


and your olive skin and the look of sin (yeah, you took me by surprise)

by fivesecrets



Series: for the last time verse [2]
Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: Background Relationships, Disjointed Time Setting, F/M, Falling In Love, First Meetings, First Time, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Multiple Relationships, Multiple Settings, Prequel, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 07:40:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19902166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivesecrets/pseuds/fivesecrets
Summary: Something resonates in Julian’s throat, because suddenly he remembers a very particular game of football after school when he was twelve years old. He knows Kai has a brother called Jan. He remembers Jannis, barely even five-foot-tall, doing penalties against Kai’s dad and suddenly, despite the fact he and Kai have been close for a year now, he remembers precisely where he knows the name Havertz from. It’s the wide-eyed kid adolescent him wanted to compliment on his outrageous talent. The kid who was rumoured to be going to Leverkusen’s youth academy.Or, in which Julian's life is dictated by the fact he can never stop himself from having fucking stupid feelings, but then he meets Kai and it turns a whole other level of unbearable.





	and your olive skin and the look of sin (yeah, you took me by surprise)

**Author's Note:**

> • I mentioned in the last part that this is inspired off I Lived Verse. It's almost like a SKAM remake, if you will (except the plot is different).  
> • I tend to try and keep my fics as historically accurate as possible, however for narrative's sake Julian transfers to Leverkusen in June 2014 instead of January.  
> • As a warning, this part has a lot of time skips - particularly section four (2016-2019). I've tried not to miss much important detail, but please forgive me if you think 'why has she not written more about this character?' or such. I also had to cut it shorter so there's gradually less filler information, descriptions etc., and more just notable events in the development of their relationship.  
> • I'm making a playlist of appropriate songs that fit the verse, so please contribute!  
> • The ending was slightly rushed because I'm going away and wanted to finish it before I left. I might edit in future.

**_bremen, germany (2008)_ **

Julian winces as a ball of scrunched up paper hits the back of his head and falls onto the floor next to him, the laughs he recognises as his best friends’ echoing in his ears as he leans down to pick it up, avoiding eye contact with his English teacher who has divulged into another spiel about her personal life with her favourite student. He already knows what the note is going to say and is plotting about how to find Jannis after school before he’s even opened it.

_‘Football after school?’_

He sends a nod to Dan and Lukas and turns back to his work, cursing silently as he squints to comprehend the complex English verbs on his sheet. There’s only ten minutes left but the lesson drags, partly because Julian hates English and partly because he’s trying not to get himself distracted by his friends after one too many tellings-off for talking.

The bell rings as he files his work and heads out of class, making his way across the courtyard to the art block where he knows Jannis has last period. His brother peters out of the classroom lazily with an expectant look on his face when he sees Julian waiting, and agrees to tell their mother before Julian can even ask him.

He shoots off a text anyway (just on the off chance she’ll actually use her phone and see it) as Dan and Lukas, along with several others they’ve taken to playing football with, catch up to him and pull him along, out of the school gates.

Lukas is ranting on about his maths teacher as they walk towards the park in the centre of Bremen, but Julian finds himself tuning his best friend out. He’d never been lonely, Dan and he came up through the same Grundschule and stayed friends throughout, meeting Lukas in their first form time in the first year and he’d slotted in perfectly. However, he’d never been popular, not until the school football coach ran trials for the team and he’d been “standout,” and suddenly everyone wanted to be his friend and he had more than a couple of girls ask to date him. 

Someone he knows vaguely slaps him on the back as they reach their designated pitch, and he knows immediately what it means. He follows the guy, Lewis, to one side of the group and waits as the rest of the lads sort out the teams between themselves. It turns out that they’re one short, so Dan (who’d ended up on the other team) calls out the standard, “team with Jule on has one man less!” as Lewis begins instructing them on how to set themselves up.

The game begins with one of Julian’s teammates passing the ball to him and he runs forward instinctively, getting so far as Dan before his best friend, the school’s first choice centre half, dispossesses him, which of course results in the opposition team yelling railleries at him.

It’s not long before Lewis passes him a high ball and he beats the offside trap, darting past Lewis nimbly as he finds himself in front of the ‘goal’ designated with two of their jackets. The goalkeeper, Thomas, doesn’t stand a chance when Julian rolls an easy shot past him and runs off, laughing, as his team charge him down and dogpile on top of him.

He's defending a corner when his eyes fall on a young boy darting ahead of his family, pointing at their game and shouting something in a dialect Julian doesn't understand. He's distracted, and jumps right into Dan who exaggerates rolling on the floor and Julian knows what's coming.

“Fuck you, Brandt!” Lewis yells, only half-joking, “you're supposed to be good!”

The opposition's striker puts the (definitely suspect) penalty away easily and Julian drags his feet back towards the kickoff formation.

Within a minute, he puts in an inch-perfect challenge on Lukas and takes the ball off him, before chipping both Dan and Thomas in one shot and scoring another goal, just as the trees begin to howl with a ferocious wind and the ball rolls away in the bluster. Julian doesn’t say anything and begins chasing it through the park when all of a sudden, a hand reaches out and swipes it from thin air. When he looks up, he sees a boy, not much older than him, already proffering the ball back as the wind dies down.

“Thanks,” he says, taking it back and starts to head back towards the game when the boy speaks.

“That didn’t last long. The wind, I mean.” He talks with an accent and it’s intriguing, because everyone knows that Bremen is a notoriously windy city and the short gusts are nothing out of the ordinary.

“You’re not from here?” Julian says dumbly.

“No. We’re from Aachen, and we’re stopping off here overnight while we drive to Denmark.” The boy gestures at his family, who Julian didn’t notice before. There’s his dad, his mum, a girl who looks a similar age to the boy who’s looking at something on her phone and a boy, the one Julian saw earlier who looks about nine, staring at him with deep brown eyes that pierce straight through Julian. “I’m Jan Havertz. Nice to meet you.”

“Julian Brandt,” he says courteously, before bouncing the ball in his hand, “do you play?”

“Yeah,” Jan nods.

“We’re one short, do you want to come and join us?” Julian notices the youngest boy’s ears perk up at this. Jan smiles and throws a questioning look at his father before following Julian towards his friends.

“What took you so long?” Dan yells when he’s within earshot.

“Fucking your mother!” He retorts casually, feeling a weird sense of pride when Jan snickers beside him, “anyway, I got another guy to come and join us. This is Jan, from Aachen.”

The guys take turns to greet the latest recruit to their game, Jan fitting in alongside Julian as a strike partnership while Lukas places the ball in the centre and kicks off. Their team concedes almost immediately after confusion between the two defenders, and the game only continues once their goalkeeper has subjected them to a yelling of choice words that only subsides when Julian points at the Havertz family coming towards them. Jan receives the ball from Lewis and releases Julian, playing a double pass before Jan finishes the shot expertly.

When Julian hits an aerial shot, he hears clapping and can’t help but smile at the sight of Jan’s little brother applauding his goal, right as his team barrel into him, screaming about his hat-trick.

Julian’s team ends up winning 9-3 and Jan’s pulled into the celebrations like he’s been there forever, rebutting the accusations flying about him being significantly older with confirmations of his age – thirteen, only a couple of months older than Julian. Julian smirks when he sees Dan pull his annoyed face (his best friend is perhaps the most competitive person he’s ever met) as the teams begin to discuss tactics for the second game of the afternoon.

“How old’s your brother?” Julian asks Jan while the group disbands.

“He’s eight. Nine in a couple of months. Pretty talented with a football,” Jan answers, voice dropping quieter, “there’s talk of him moving to Leverkusen’s academy in a couple of years.”

Julian nods, firing another glance over at Jan’s brother who’s got a football of his own and is kicking it around in a circle with insane control for an eight-year-old. He’s about to call over to the guys when he notices a familiar figure running across the park towards them.

“Jannis,” he says when his brother gets within earshot, “what are you doing here?”

“I came to play football!”

“We’ve got two full teams today,” Julian explains, as politely as he can in the presence of the Havertz family who he’s noticed have watched him intently, “you can sit and watch though.”

Jannis nods, eyeing the unfamiliar boy and his family and deciding not to cause a scene, sinking down onto the grass and leaning against a tree. Lewis captures their attention effortlessly and announces something about setting themselves up for the second match and quickly rebuffs the calls of splitting Julian and Jan up, before hurrying over to them and instructing them to get underway before the other team can “cry any more.”

“He’s the captain, I guess?” Jan says as they stand on the designated halfway line.

“Yeah, he works us hard.”

Before Jan can say anything else, Lewis blows the whistle and the second game begins with Julian and his newfound partner careering towards Thomas’ goal. They’re shooting the other way, and now have to contend with keeping their shots low so they don’t kick an innocent old lady walking along the stone path in the head. Julian gets the opener, scuffing Dan’s jacket as the ball slips past and runs away laughing at his best friend, feels Jan jump on his back.

They’re turning to walk back into position when Julian notices Jannis and Jan’s little brother kicking the other football between them. His brother is saying something about Klose that the other boy laughs loudly at and it’s obvious the two of them have hit it off immediately.

“Kai’s getting on well with your brother,” Jan remarks as he catches up to him.

“That’s weird,” Julian says, “Jannis isn’t really the sociable type.”

“Kai is. He’ll talk to anyone so long as they like football.”

“He’ll do well at Leverkusen then, if he goes,” Julian says and that’s it, the game’s kicked off again and they’re forced into defending a charge from Lukas and a couple of his teammates.

He can’t lie and say he isn’t distracted for the rest of the match. He still manages to grab another goal and assists Jan as it’s his turn to net a hat-trick, but his gaze keeps flitting over to Jannis and Kai, who are now taking it in turns to shoot penalties against Kai’s dad. He’s pretty sure he lets Julian’s brother score, but it’s clear to Julian that Kai’s shots are of the utmost quality already. Part of him wants to ditch the game and play against this kid, maybe team with his brother and play the Havertz’s, but when Lewis darts off the pitch and blows the full-time whistle, Jannis turns to him.

“We need to go home now. Oma and Opa are coming at seven.”

Julian rolls his eyes and grabs his bag from the pile, slapping hands with some of his friends before he reaches Jan.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, “safe trip to Denmark.”

“Thanks,” Jan says, before turning his gaze to his mother, who is saying something about them heading back to their hotel. Julian waves at the Havertz family before they begin to walk away, across the park in the other direction to his and Jannis’ house and it hits him he’ll never get the chance to compliment Kai Havertz on his incredible talent.

Jannis can’t shut up about him the whole walk home as Julian loses himself in imaginations of Jan joining their school team and tearing up all the other shitty schools in Bremen. It’s only a short walk back to their house, but the wind is starting to pick up when they cross the front garden and Julian’s sure he feels a drop of rain hit the back of his hand.

He breathes a sigh of relief when the door shuts behind them and the skies open, clouding over within seconds and rain thundering down over the city. He can almost see his friends yelling as they dive for cover and chuckles to himself, blatantly ignoring the judgemental looks Jannis is giving him. The smell of his mother’s cooking wafts to meet them from the kitchen and he follows his younger brother to greet her, hitting Jascha gently on the head as he passes.

“Don’t hit your brother,” his mother says automatically, without even turning to look at him. Before Julian can even apologise, though, Jannis launches into a spiel about the game and it’s not long before he brings up the Havertz brothers. He sees his mother break out into a smile as she stirs the sauce, obviously only half-listening to what Jannis is saying.

“That’s lovely, sweetheart,” she says, kissing him on the forehead before leaning over and doing the same to Julian, “go and get changed, Jule. You too, Jannis. Oma and Opa will be here soon.”

When they reach the top of the stairs, Julian turns to his little brother and punches his shoulder, “you’ll never guess what Jan told me.”

“What?”

“Kai might be going to Leverkusen to train in their academy in a couple of years.”

Jannis’ eyes widen comically as he exclaims, “Leverkusen? You mean, Kai’s going to make it and play in the Bundesliga?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Just because he may be going to a youth academy does not mean he’s going to end up as an elite footballer,” Julian chastises, but really he knows that kid has the talent. He wouldn’t be surprised if he sees Kai on television one day.

He wonders what Kai would look like by then. Would he be tall? Short? Would those green eyes still glint like that, or would it be muted, worn down by age and adolescence? He ponders it for so long Jannis has lost interest with his weird silence and disappeared into his bedroom to get changed as the clock ticks on towards seven in the evening and the rain continues to patter against the windows.

The next day, he gets moved away from Lukas and Dan in English and spends the lesson daydreaming about getting accepted into a youth academy of his own, only stopping to write a few mediocre answers whenever the teacher glances his way. He has training at his team, Borgfeld, in the evening so when the bell to dismiss class rings, he leaves without so much as a backwards glance at his friends. 

Residue of rain forces them to play though sloshed ground on the Friday afternoon. Lewis is off sick, so one of the members of the other team is demoted to referee, but the conditions, as well as the absence of their key central midfielder, make it much harder for Julian to relax into his slick football. Running through the mud feels like a slog.

“Not so easy when you don’t have an unfairly good partner to assist you!” Dan calls out when he misses an open goal and lies on the floor, probably getting grass stains over his white shirt and is only able to half care about the probable nagging he’s going to receive from his mother later. He reaches a hand out and flips his best friend off before sighing and pulling himself to his feet.

They play almost every day after school, Julian coming along whenever he doesn’t have training with his external team, but after Dan’s comment the Havertz’s are never mentioned again.

* * *

_**bremen, germany (2011)** _

“Great way to spend your birthday,” Dan remarks, deadpan, as he takes a seat next to Julian and his mother in the school’s auditorium. Their mothers lose themselves in conversation easily when Dan turns to him and whispers, “it’s your sixteenth. You shouldn’t be at some shitty meeting about choosing Abi subjects, where they’re just going to tell us things we’ve heard a thousand times already, you should be out celebrating and you know… getting a girl.”

Julian feels his cheeks burn furiously and turns his attention away from his best friend, who is cackling underneath his breath, focusing down on the headteacher who is greeting them in his monotonous voice.

They’re forced to sit through his spiel for bordering on forty-five minutes while he covers the importance of the Abitur exams (as if there’s a single person in the room who wouldn’t know) and really, the only thing keeping Julian from falling asleep are the hilarious comments Dan mutters every now and then. He’s also pissed because he had to miss training (he managed to make it into FC Oberneuland’s youth academy) just to listen to this dreary speech.

Just as he feels like he’s about to drop dead from boredom, they’re finally released to go and speak to the subject teachers. He already knows he’s going to take German, Biology, History and Sport, and he’s discussed the balance with his football in meticulous detail, so he’s really starting to lose the point of attending when he bumps into an unfamiliar girl at the Biology section. The teachers have moved over and are in discussion with the chemistry teachers about something he can just about make out as environmental issue, and brushes past the girl with a mumbled apology. He’s just about to pick a leaflet from the desk and leave when she speaks,

“Can you help me?” She asks. “I’m new and I don’t know who the biology teachers are.”

He turns back to her and takes a proper look. She’s pretty small, short blonde hair brushing against her shoulders as she looks up at him shyly.

“Sure,” he says, not sure as to why he’s apparently broken out into a ridiculous smile, “they’re just over here.”

His teacher, Schmidt, spots him as he leads the girl over to the group and breaks away, expressing exaggerated delight at Julian’s choice of subject and wishing him a happy birthday before turning to the girl.

“How can I help you?” He says to her, and Julian’s backing away from the conversation awkwardly when he catches her introducing herself as Lotta, and it keeps his attention just long enough for him to find out she’s been assigned to his biology class and will be in the lesson the next morning. He thinks of the chair next to him, empty after his previous partner moved to Munich, and wonders if she’ll get sat there.

He finds his mother chatting with Lukas and his dad on the other side of the hall and tells her he’s ready to leave, certain on his subjects and with that, they wave goodbye and step out into the drizzle of the darkening sky.

The rest of his birthday passes as a non-event, the Abitur meeting derailing any plans he has to celebrate. He ends up on the phone to his grandmother, one hand rubbing the dog’s belly, as he tells her all about his subject choices like it’s a completely normal day. Lotta doesn’t even occur to him until he’s lying in bed, trying to get to sleep as the wind picks up outside, and even then, he’s not completely sure he can picture her correctly.

He drifts off into a dreamless sleep about eleven-fifteen.

He’s torn from sleep by his mother bursting into his room and yelling about him being late for school and one look at the clock on his bedside table informs him he’s slept through his alarm for the third time this term. Groaning, he drags himself out of bed and throws on the first clothes he pulls from his wardrobe, not caring if they match, before stumbling down into the kitchen where his brothers are fighting over the cereal, making far more noise than he can be fucked to deal with at this time of the morning.

Once Jascha leaves the breakfast table, Jannis turns to him with a bright smile.

“What?” He grumbles.

“Nothing!” Jannis exclaims, even his voice exuding a perk that just serves to piss Julian off more, “just looking forward to going to school.”

“Who the fuck looks forward to going to school?”

“Language!” His mother scolds as she enters the kitchen, leaning against the countertop. “What lessons do you have today?”

“English, Maths, German,” Julian says, “biology.”

She nods, turning to Jannis (who is still beaming like he’s just won the lottery, the little fucker) and if it wasn’t for the fact Julian’s still half-asleep, he’d have snapped at his brother to shut up because as far as Julian’s listened, Jannis is rambling on about something completely unrelated to the prior conversation. Julian looks up long enough to notice his younger brother’s bag already packed, placed on the chair next to him for maybe the first time in his life. Jannis is the type of character to be late to his own wedding.

His brother almost pulls him out of the door when he’s finally ready to leave. Their school is only a ten-minute walk away, but he’s pretty sure they manage it in about six minutes flat because Jannis is practically running.

“What the fuck is up with you today?” He says as they pass through the school gates.

“I just can’t wait to experience the joys of education!” Jannis says lamely, before his smile lights up so much it borders on deranged and he sprints away from Julian’s side.

He just about tracks his brother as he runs across the courtyard, cringing internally when Jannis almost knocks over a tiny girl standing on the outside of a group, all crowded together and giggling about something. He spots his brother stop in front of another girl, with an older girl Julian recognises as Tatjana, Lukas’ crush, and looking very amused at what Jannis and her sister are saying.

Really, he should’ve worked out that Jannis has a crush beforehand, but that doesn’t stop him from coiling internally when he sees the way his brother is acting. He can see the bewildered students shooting glances and it goes from bad to worse when Lukas and Dan suddenly appear and throw their arms around him, mockery already on their lips, and Lukas making comments about knowing how Jannis feels. They don’t stop until they reach their seats in English class, but by the time they reconvene for break, they’ve migrated on to dissecting Lukas’ apparent tiny interaction with Tatjana at the end of Geography.

Julian can’t shake himself of a feeling he can’t place all day, especially when the rain starts throwing it down halfway through lunchtime and the seeming entirety of their year is crammed into a hall that is nowhere near big enough. The bell signalling the end of break is almost a relief.

He’s one of the first to escape the crush of students and takes his seat in the biology classroom, politely returning the small talk Schmidt makes with him while he gets his books out, settling his bag on the seat next to him instead of on the floor. They’re five minutes into the lesson when there’s a timid knock on the door.

“Hi,” Lotta says, voice wobbling slightly, and Julian _almost_ feels bad for her, but he’s too distracted by how much prettier she is than he remembers. “I couldn’t find the classroom, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s alright,” Schmidt says, scanning the room layout before his eyes fall on the seat currently occupied by Julian’s bag, “come and sit next to Julian.”

Lotta walks across the classroom, making eye contact with him and smiling gently and it takes all of Julian’s sense to break him to remember to smile back and move his bag to the floor so Lotta can sit down. Schmidt pauses the lesson and makes every student introduce themselves with a stupid random fact (Julian conceals the smirk when he hears everyone whine customarily) before challenging Lotta to recount every single person.

Julian hates how adorable it is when she blushes.

He’s glad when Schmidt turns back to the lesson, because now he has an excuse to not look at her and the small, shy smile on her face as she looks up through her hair. They’re given out worksheets about two-thirds of the way through the lesson and instructed to work in pairs to complete it. Julian could swear Schmidt winks at him as he drops the sheet on his and Lotta’s desk.

“Hey,” she says quietly when the class dissolves into chatter, “thanks for helping me last night.”

“It’s not a problem,” Julian says far too fast and _fuck_ , what the hell is wrong with him? He’s pretty sure his voice is borderline squeaking when he continues, “It wasn’t like it was exactly out of my way or anything.” But Lotta laughs anyway and Julian just about manages to compose himself enough to get on with the work without making any embarrassing mistakes.

The rest of the lesson passes really quickly, and Julian asks her what lessons she has the next day before he can stop himself.

“We have this first lesson,” she says with the tiniest hint of amusement, “and I know I have history third.”

“With Mrs Miller? I’m in that class.”

Lotta smiles, before her phone buzzes and her goodbye is hurried over her shoulder, not even giving him a chance to respond before she’s out of the door.

Julian pointedly ignores the knowing look on Schmidt’s face as he packs his stuff up and leaves the room, hurrying through the swarm of students trying to make their way through the too-small corridor and almost runs straight into Jannis coming out of his history class.

“Let’s go,” he says, pulling him along harshly and is completely unresponsive to Jannis’ whines of protest. He hears the goodbye his brother calls out to Tatjana’s sister as they lose her in the crowd, right before they pass Lotta, who is standing by the bottom of the staircase looking intently at her phone, and if Julian sneaks a second glance at her he hopes to God Jannis doesn’t notice.

The weather has brightened considerably as they exit the grounds, walking home almost as quickly as they made their way that morning. In his peripheral vision, he can see the bewilderment on Jannis’ face, but his brother doesn’t say anything until they turn into their street and Julian finally slows down.

“What was that?” Jannis asks, looking more than a little put out.

“I wanted to get home,” Julian lies, “don’t want to be late for training, and I’ve got homework to do.”

Jannis eyes him suspiciously as Julian reaches into his backpack to grab his keys, letting them into the deserted house, running up the stairs and into his bedroom before his brother has even taken his shoes off.

He can barely focus on his German homework, staring at the research questions like it’s written in a foreign language. He’s obviously distracted at training, missing all of his shots and putting in late challenges, but it’s acceptable until he glances over to the training complex and catches a glimpse of blonde hair through the window. It’s ridiculous, really, to get so worked up over a common characteristic (hell, even _he_ has blonde hair), but he hasn’t been feeling anything like himself for a minute all day.

It feels like midsummer when he’s lying in bed that night, tossing and turning as his skin burns warm while the heat sticks in the air. Dan wakes up around three in the morning and the two of them text for about thirty minutes about random shit (mainly, taking the piss out of Lukas) before Dan apparently falls asleep mid-conversation because he suddenly stops replying.

Pure exhaustion finally knocks him out as the pale streaks of dawn break through the curtains, but he’s still overtired when his alarm drags him from sleep. Jannis doesn’t even bother to wait for him and he’s lucky to avoid a berating from Schmidt when he trudges into first period biology five minutes late.

“Morning,” Lotta says when he collapses down next to her, staring at the whiteboard and tries to decode the incomprehensible mess Schmidt’s writing has merged into, “we’re looking at polymorphic genes today.”

“Thanks,” he says, placing his books onto the desk with a thud, “how are you?” But before Lotta can reply, Schmidt calls him out for disrupting the class and he turns his face to his book, copying down the notes quickly.

Lotta doesn’t speak again until there’s fifteen minutes left,

“I saw you last night.”

“Where?” He asks, finishing his sentence and turns to look at her.

“Oberhausen. I write articles about the first team for the website. You were outside training. I watched you for a while.”

“Did you?” Julian feels his cheeks get hot when he remembers how awful he was at practice the evening before, “I promise I’m not always that bad.”

“I know,” Lotta laughs, ducking her head when Schmidt sends a warning glance her way, “I’ve seen you play on several occasions and you’re really good. It’s actually why I had the confidence to ask you to help me find the biology teachers on Wednesday, but you didn’t recognise me.”

“Sorry,” Julian says awkwardly, “how did you get into the media team?”

“It’s just voluntary. It’s what I want to do in the future anyway, so I thought it’d be good to get some experience.”

“It’ll be nice seeing you around more,” he says before he can stop himself, pinpointing his gaze on his book almost immediately so she can’t see him cringe.

He hopes she’ll wait for him at the end of the lesson, but she’s called away by Francia, who sits on the other side of the classroom, saying something about the two of them going to English together. He kicks his heels throughout the entirety of second period and stands up when the bell rings for the end of break so quickly, Dan and Lukas shoot him weird glances.

Lotta’s already in the classroom when he stumbles through the door and his heart sinks to see she is sitting about as far away from him as possible. He feels his blood run hot in his veins when he has the sense of her eyes trained on his back and suddenly, attempting not to turn around is almost painful. Tatjana sitting down next to him is almost a lifeline because he forces himself to disregard Lotta by sending Lukas videos of Tatjana getting increasingly annoyed at him, until their teacher comes in and he has to stuff his phone in his pocket because she is the least tolerant person he’s ever met.

Mrs Miller sets them an essay question and leaves them to get on with it. Some of his classmates who he knows won’t be taking history next year immediately begin chatting, and he clenches his eyes shut as he tries to focus on recalling everything he knows about the American civil war. Tatjana is muttering to herself next to him and, distracted, he throws a look at Lotta before he can stop himself.

She’s running a hand through her hair as she writes, twirling a stray piece that’s fallen down over her face and _fuck_ , she looks so pretty it takes him five minutes to propel his mind back to the essay topic.

When the bell rings, Lotta’s one of the first to reach the door. Julian’s still placing his books in his bag and tries to detach from the conversation Tatjana’s making with him to speak to her, but she’s through the door and heading down the corridor before he can garner the courage to speak.

He doesn’t see her again for the rest of the school day, but from the moment he arrives at training he’s hypervigilant as he tries to find her within the complex. There’s ten minutes before he’s needed out on the pitch, so he pushes open the door and steps into the room where she is.

“Evening,” he says, laughing internally at the way she jumps in surprise.

“Hi,” when Julian gets closer, he can see an analysis video of the first team’s weekend game sharing Lotta’s computer screen with a writing document. “When’s your training start?”

“About nine minutes,” Julian says with far too much laughter in his voice, fucking hell she must think he’s an _idiot_ , “how’s your article going?”

“Good. I only have to write two more this season,” she says and it’s then Julian remembers that it’s early May, and the first team’s season will be ending in little over two weeks.

“Do you not come in over summer?”

“Only for the most important days,” Lotta says, before she’s hit with a burst of inspiration and the next two minutes pass with nothing but the sound of her fingers against the keyboard, “but not normally.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I’ve been doing this for about a year and a half.”

“How long have you lived in Bremen?”

“All my life,” she says, “I just hated my old school.”

“Fair enough,” Julian says, before his eyes catch the clock and through the window, he can see his teammates beginning to gather on the field and drags himself towards the door, “I have to go.”

“I’ll be watching,” Lotta smiles.

“Just before I leave, though, can I--,” he swallows, willing his voice not to crack, “can I have your number?” He can see the glint in her eyes as she smiles and grabs a piece of paper from the desk, pen scribbling against the paper before scrunching it up and throwing it at him. He feels his neck warm when it hits him square in the face. “Thanks. See you on Monday.”

“See you Monday,” she says. It takes an awful lot of will for Julian to let the door close behind him, and not to glance at the window opening into Lotta’s office every time he gets a moment to breathe. It’s weird, because training was always simple, but now it’s like a performance when he doesn’t know if she’s even watching.

He tries not to text her the moment he steps through his front door that evening, but his resolve lasts about ten minutes before he gives in. He’s staring at the patterns on his bedroom ceiling, chastising himself for the sudden emergence of feelings he’s never had before, for a girl he’s known not even three days. For sixteen years, his life had been football and really, he should hate her for tapping him on the shoulder and shyly asking him for directions on the evening of the meeting. His career is getting to a stage where his life needs to be devoted to football and nothing else and of course that’s the moment he meets a girl. 

Briefly, he wonders if it’s a side-effect of Lukas’ constant musing about girls.

His phone buzzes on his chest.

 **Lotta:** hey

 **Lotta:** thank you for being so nice to me since we met

 **Julian:** it’s no problem!

He spends the next twenty minutes waiting for a reply from her, reopening his message app every couple of minutes to make sure the message hasn’t come in and he’s missed it, but Lotta doesn’t say anything else and he doesn’t want to scare her off when she’s only just got there.

It’s roughly then he realises he has no idea what to do with girls.

He chucks his head on the pillow and groans, probably loud enough for his brothers to hear and when he hears Jannis giggling through the walls, yells a muffled, “I’m not masturbating, fucker!” at him. About a minute later, his door bursts open and it’s his mother, telling him off for yelling expletives at his brother before he remembers his parents were in the room on the other side of him and definitely heard everything.

Sleep evades him for the second night out of three and he pulls himself out of bed with his eyes still practically glued together. He has the final match of the academy season that afternoon, and he knows there are a couple of better clubs circling around Oberhausen who are interested in him, and his coach has already reminded him there will be scouts at the game today. The club have secured themselves in the same league, but they wanted promotion so he can’t help but feel like their coach is a little disappointed with their overall performance.

One of his teammates jumps on him almost immediately after he steps out of the car when he arrives for the game. He can’t help the grogginess tying him down when he swears openly, letting his friend drop to the floor.

“Wolfsburg are here to look at you again,” he gets told by about seven people before he even gets his boots on, “they’re seriously interested.”

He doesn’t respond to any of them, doesn’t want to think about the possibility of transferring to another club at the end of the season and leaving Bremen, leaving Dan and Lukas and Lewis and everyone who he doesn’t play football with anymore, but still greets whenever they see each other in the corridors. He doesn’t want to leave Lotta, not when he’s stayed up for hours wondering why he could never get a crush on a girl and now he’s sure he’s finally developing one.

They’re warming up when his eyes fall on Lotta in the stands and he stares at her for a couple of seconds before he notices some of the spectators laughing at him. He turns away decisively and wills himself not to look back. As he does, he makes eye contact with his coach who beckons him over.

“Precisely how long have you known Miss Schneider?”

“Miss Schneider?” He says dumbly, before his coach gestures in Lotta’s direction, visibly annoyed, and Julian remembers he’s never actually learned Lotta’s surname before. “Only about half a week.”

“I can see,” his coach bristles, “you’ve been distracted ever since. You’ve always been so good with not getting distracted by girls, unlike some of the others, and you owe it to yourself to prioritise your career. If you want to be a professional footballer, you can’t stay at Oberhausen forever.”

“I know,” he says, “I’ll play well.”

“You better,” his coach says, already turning away, “those scouts are here for you only.”

His coach’s words ring in his ears as he stands on pitch waiting for kick-off, runs his hand through his hair one final time as the referee brings the whistle to his lips. Before he can even think, the game has begun, and Oberhausen are immediately placed on the defensive.

The scouts follow his every move. Whenever they fall in his sight, some part of him weakens inside because it’s all he’s ever wanted. He pushes on through the first half and manages to set up a goal and forcing two defenders to collide into each other and as he turns away to celebrate, he can see some of the scouts nodding approval. He glances up to Lotta and when he sees her clapping, eyes trained on him, he smiles immediately.

Oberhausen wins 3-1, Julian scoring two in the second half and suddenly, his coach is whispering things like “we’ll miss you next year, kid,” like it’s a dead cert he’ll leave. Part of him wants to get carried away in his moment, but then Lotta bounds down the stairs towards them, blonde hair falling over her face and suddenly everyone else on the pitch doesn’t matter.

“You played really well,” she smiles.

“Thanks,” he says, trying to make himself say more but then she’s called away by her parents, “see you in class on Monday.”

When he’s back in the dressing room after the match, he remembers what she said to him yesterday.

 **Julian:** why didn’t you tell me you were coming to watch the game yesterday?

He stares at his phone for five minutes as his teammates undress around him, waiting for the ‘delivered’ to turn to a ‘seen’ but Lotta isn’t active so he sighs and begins to unlace his boots. As he does so, his coach bursts in, followed by a man Julian recognises vaguely as a Wolfsburg scout, in avid conversation with his mother. Every pair of eyes in the room fixates on him.

The scout remains torturously silent until the door closes behind the last of Julian’s teammates.

“We’ve been watching you throughout the season,” he begins, staring at Julian with an intensity that makes Julian feel powerless in his presence, “and once I get back to Wolfsburg, we’re going to be discussing an offer for you to join our academy, because you’re too talented to pass up.”

He glances at his mother and something in his heart swells when he sees the smile on her face. 

“But what we can tell you is we have a trusted host family for you to live with, and you’d be able to complete your education with no problem. You are under no pressure to accept instantly, if you want to discuss the terms once we send them to you, but this is your warning that they are coming.”

“Thank you,” Julian says, feeling a rush of finally being on the verge of achieving something. The scout talks with his coach as they leave the locker room, leaving Julian alone with his mother.

“I’m so proud of you,” she says, coming over and wrapping her arms around him. He’s so much taller than her now he can’t help but bury his face in her hair and whisper “thank you,” repeatedly.

“It’s a big decision but your father and I will support you with whatever you choose,” she tells him, before picking his bag off the bench and walking out of the locker room, “are you coming with me or will I be picking you up after training tomorrow?”

He laughs, and it’s only when he passes the office that he spoke to Lotta in does he remember her, and the way she smiled at him when he assisted the goal, and the way she laughs at his jokes and that he’s only known her for four days, and it must be the fact he’s never had a crush before because fucking hell does he not know how to deal with it. Dan and Lukas would laugh at him forever if they could hear his inner monologue.

She texts him back late in the evening, while he’s watching a film with his brothers, and flips Jannis off when he groans at the sudden light of Julian’s phone screen.

 **Lotta:** idk

 **Lotta:** decided to watch in the spur of the moment i guess?

 **Lotta:** you played really well today

 **Julian:** thanks

“Put that down,” Jannis whines, “you’re ruining the film.”

Julian leaves the room in record time, almost tripping up the stairs as he takes them two at a time before hurling himself onto his bed. Lotta’s sent him another text.

 **Lotta:** is all you do school and football?

 **Julian:** pretty much

 **Julian:** i’ve wanted to be a footballer for as long as i can remember

 **Lotta:** it’s a good feeling, knowing what you want to do

 **Julian:** journalism, i assume?

 **Lotta:** yeah

 **Julian:** i read a couple of your articles

 **Julian:** you’re really talented

 **Lotta:** thank you

 **Julian:** welcome :)

Lotta doesn’t reply and it’s not like Julian can go downstairs and re-join his brothers after ditching the film at the first sign of her, so he falls back on his bed and watches YouTube videos until he falls asleep.

He doesn’t text her again for another week and a half despite the conversations they have in class (sometimes he thinks Schmidt is pretty close to separating them already), preferring to not message her at all than have her leave him on ‘read,’ plus he’s spent most of his free time mulling over the contract offered by Wolfsburg. It isn’t until he’s walking into first period history when he feels his phone buzz in his jacket.

The way his stomach convulses when he sees her name isn’t normal and it’s very terrifying.

 **Lotta:** i hate mrs miller so much

 **Julian:** same

 **Julian:** are you doing history for abi?

 **Lotta:** definitely not

 **Lotta:** my old history teacher has made me hate the subject forever

He falls into his seat, throwing an open glance at Lotta and smiling when he sees her typing on her phone before feeling his phone vibrate. Tatjana’s off sick, so he hasn’t got anyone to talk to, so he tunes out the yells of the rest of the class about some student-teacher football game (he can’t play) that’s happening after school.

 **Julian:** not like mrs miller is going to invoke that love back into you

 **Lotta:** like hell she is

 **Julian:** you don’t really talk about your old school

 **Julian:** why did you leave in the middle of the term?

 **Julian:** if you’re okay with talking about it that is

 **Lotta:** i just really didn’t like it there

 **Lotta:** i didn’t feel intellectually challenged enough and here’s got a much better reputation in terms of academic results

 **Julian:** that’s fair

 **Julian:** i’m glad you joined anyway

 **Julian:** you make biology a lot more fun

He can’t stop himself from looking over at her and something in it leaps when she looks up to meet his eyes and _actually blushes_ , shaking her head slightly.

 **Lotta:** it’s been lovely getting to know you as well

He’s tapping out a response when he hears Mrs Miller raise her voice at him,

“Julian! What could possibly be on that phone that’s more important than this lesson?” She strides over to him and he stuffs his phone in his pocket because he’d rather die than get Lotta in trouble, so he holds her angry glare and braces himself for what she’s about to say, “you’re taking this for Abitur, you should be paying attention! I know you footballers tend to drift off into your fantasy worlds where you’re rich and famous, but your school exams are just as important, and I expect you to at least give me the decency of your attention!”

“Yes miss,” he says quietly, looking down in some fake show of apology before he watches her walk away and continue the lesson. He feels his phone receive another message and not checking it after the rush he feels texting her is almost agony.

“I have a problem,” he says when he sits down next to Dan and Lukas later. The text was from Lotta, saying nothing but ‘sorry,’ and Julian wished she was in his next class so they could laugh about it.

“What is it? Is there an issue with the Wolfsburg transfer?” Dan asks.

“Kind of,” he admits, unable to look them in the eye, “I have a crush.”

“Okay… on who?”

“This new girl. The one I was talking to at the Abi meeting. Her name’s Lotta, and she writes articles at Oberneuland, and we texted for a bit but then we stopped, and now we started again, and I don’t know… I just really like her.”

“Lotta as in Lotta Schneider?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s in my maths class,” Dan says, “she seems really nice, and she did say on her first lesson that she doesn’t have a boyfriend as well. Do you know if she’s into you?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be deliberating with you two right now.” Julian snarks, before he gets another message and cuts Lukas off.

 **Lotta:** have been called in to interview a member of the first team tonight. do you have training?

“Is that her?” Lukas asks.

“Yeah. She’s going to be at the academy tonight.”

 **Julian:** i do

“Bro just tell her you like her. You’ve got a massive decision to make already, you can’t afford to let yourself be distracted and if you tell her, that means you’ll know. If she likes you back, you can see if it’ll work despite whatever you choose, and if she doesn’t, then it’s one less thing to worry about.”

“That’s rich coming from you, considering Tatjana,” he shoots back, punching Lukas to avoid the other’s fist coming into gentle contact with the side of his face, “but as much as I hate to admit it, I think you’re right.”

“I always am. Text her and tell her you want to see her tonight.”

 **Julian:** can i come and see you after practice? there’s something i want to talk to you about

 **Lotta:** sure

 **Lotta:** but can you just tell me now? i hate suspense

 **Julian:** this kind of thing is better said personally. in private

 **Lotta:** fine

 **Lotta:** i await you with bated breath

 **Julian:** you should

“Did you arrange it?” Dan asks when Julian looks up and nods. “Nice one,” he adds, before throwing an arm out dramatically and almost hitting Lukas square in the face, “did I tell you about what Becker did in physics? He got on a chair to start proclaiming some mystery of the universe or some shit, but then the headteacher walked in as Lewis turned the fan on, and he fell straight off. It was fucking hilarious.”

Julian laughs along, but then he catches a glimpse of Lotta across the field and he’s suddenly not listening to Dan anymore.

He spends the entirety of last period English staring at the clock, watching the hands tick agonisingly slowly before it finally strikes three-thirty and he can escape. Jannis apparently had a substitute teacher so he’s already waiting outside Julian’s classroom, so the two of them exit school before the post-school crush has fallen out onto the courtyard and beginning to head for the football pitch for the game.

The words of his history essay blur on the computer screen in front of him when his mind trails to Lotta, the meeting after training, and what he promised Dan and Lukas he’d tell her. He ends up being so overcome by anticipation he’s already in full kit by the time his mother bangs on his door telling him to get his stuff ready, so he has time to change at the complex, snorting a little at the look on her face when he opens the door.

It’s muggy on the training pitch, Julian dripping in sweat as he fires in another long-distance shot during the practice game. One of his teammates slaps him on the back, and he’s pretty sure he hears a comment about him “getting some,” from somewhere in the group when they’re pulled into discussion. He locks his focus on his coach and is weirdly proud of himself when he treks off the pitch at the end of training and realises that he hasn’t looked at Lotta’s office window once for the entire ninety minutes.

He takes his time getting changed, hanging back to allow for all his teammates to leave before him (he doesn’t want Lotta to be the recipient of some of the comments his teammates fire about) and he’s pretty sure his coach is surprised when he waves a goodbye and doesn’t stop to talk about the Wolfsburg contract that is sitting on his kitchen table, unsigned.

He knocks once, twice, and then she’s calling to let him in and there’s a chair already out for him.

“Hey,” she says, once he’s sat down and suddenly looking her in the eyes is really hard.

“Hi,” he swallows, “how are you? How was the interview?”

“Good, the interview went well, thanks. You?” He murmurs something he thinks sounds like agreement, feeling his cheeks warm in her unwavering gaze, “why are you here?”

“This is kind of weird, especially given we haven’t known each other very long,” he begins, fighting his desire to run and even manages to hold her eye contact, “but I really like you.”

She nods, nibbling at her bottom lip with her teeth. It’s ridiculously distracting, and Julian can’t stand it.

“I was wondering if we could, um,” he stops, tries to remember how to breathe and drag his voice down to normal because it’s verging on a terrified squeak, “see what it’s like, being together?”

She’s silent, and mentally Julian’s already halfway home and ready to ask Wolfsburg if they could take him any earlier, but then she breaks out into a small, accepting smile and _fuck_ , she could ask him to collect the moon right that second and he’d try absolutely everything.

“We can do that. I’ve sort of been debating the same feelings for you,” she says finally, and it’s like all the air suddenly rushes out of the room. He doesn’t know what to do, what to say, so when she wraps a nervous arm around his shoulders he melts with relief into her hug. “Thank you,” she says to his shoulder, “for welcoming me into the school.”

“It’s no problem.” Part of him hopes she can’t hear the giddiness in his voice, and the other half of him couldn’t give less of a shit because _Lotta likes him back._ He runs a hand along her back as he holds her, but then his phone vibrates and the moment’s lost.

“Probably for the best,” Lotta jokes when Julian announces that his mother is waiting impatiently in the car outside for him, “I have to finish this article anyway and I don’t want to have to lock up the grounds again.”

He laughs far too loudly and chokes out a goodbye, heart racing at the little smile she gives him through the window of the door. If his mother notices the infallible smile on his face as he sits in the car, texting Dan and Lukas about what happened with Lotta (he’s glad Lukas can’t call because he’s pretty sure Dan would’ve deafened them all with his girlish screams), she doesn’t say anything. Jannis is out with some friends, and it might be the best day of Julian’s life so far, because the moment his brother sees the joyous flush on his cheeks, he is going to work out what happened and tease him for the rest of eternity.

Lotta comes to sit with them at lunchtime the next day, directing cutting comments at Julian’s friends like she’s known them for years while simultaneously leaning on Julian, who can’t stop himself from laughing obnoxiously at every comment she comes out with, relishing the way she looks up and smiles at him. It feels so natural to have her there that by the end of lunch, she’s sparked a revival of the forgotten group chat used to organise football games.

“You fit in so well,” he says to her when they’re walking to history.

“They’re nice,” is all she says, but from the way something glows in her face, he thinks that she’s secretly delighted.

They have the Friday off school, so Julian’s mother insists on taking him and Jannis over to Hamburg and then drops him straight off at the training ground in the evening. The session runs late, the sun already setting over the hills as the wind begins to pick up while Julian picks up the cones scattered around the field, squinting in the dusky light.

His resolve to keep his relationship from Jannis and Jascha lasts all of forty-eight hours, because the following night is the Champions League Final and he talks Lotta’s ear off about Lionel Messi for the entire day in the leadup to the match in London, to the point he ignores Jannis’ spiels and his brother snatches his phone out of his hands five minutes into the game.

“Why aren’t you watching?” He asks, holding Julian’s phone out of reach while Julian jumps to try and get it back. “You’ve been distracted all day.”

“I am watching!” He protests, “I’m just discussing it with a friend.”

“A friend?” Jannis says, tone dripping in sarcasm as he turns out of Julian’s reach and brings the phone down to read the screen. “A friend called Lotta, who’s got a heart next to her name?”

“She put that there!” He says pathetically, and he’s pretty sure a part of him loses the will to live when he sees the delighted expression on Jannis’ face.

“Jule’s got a girlfriend!” He yells, attracting his mother’s attention and she doesn’t even try to hide the confusion on her face.

He texts Lotta for the rest of the half, but then his mother calls him into the kitchen on the stroke of half-time, and there’s a weird sense of betrayal in the air when she puts her eyes on him.

“Julian,” she says in the warning tone he knew from when he was a child and would endanger himself with his own stupidity, “are you sure this is a smart choice?”

“I really like her,” he says like it answers her question.

“You’re probably leaving that school at the end of term and moving two hours away, and I don’t think you need me to remind you that you will barely ever get to come back here.”

“I did think of this, honestly,” he says, and he’s not exactly lying, “but I thought that there’s no harm in trying. If we think it’s worth it, we can try with the distance. If we don’t think it is, we can break up. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

“Does she know that?”

“Know what?”

“About trying with the distance?”

He tries to lie, to tell her that he’s told Lotta everything and they’ve embarked on this without any ambiguity, but he knows she can see through him. He hasn’t told Lotta the terms on which he confessed to her. He tries to speak, but words don’t come.

(Maybe, he’d think years later, that’s when it was doomed from the start.)

“Anyway,” his mother clears her throat as Jascha enters the kitchen, searching for a snack, “bring her over for dinner sometime. I’d love to meet her.”

Julian can’t shake the feeling of her relentless observation for the entirety of the second half. Not even when Messi scores from twenty yards and he’s pretty sure he can feel the atmosphere seep through his television screen. He also can’t stop himself from thinking about being alone with Lotta, and he’s pretty sure he must be getting sick because the idea fills him with a peculiar sense of dread.

The two of them discuss Messi and Barcelona until the early hours of Sunday morning when Julian’s eyelids slide shut of their own accord, but the moment he’s woken by Jascha running around with a friend at eleven, he rolls over and there’s three new messages from his girlfriend.

 **Lotta:** you fallen asleep?

 **Lotta:** cute. goodnight

 **Lotta:** morning. what are you doing today?

 **Julian:** well i was going to do my essay this morning and chill for the afternoon, but i’ve only just woken up so that plan’s out of the window

With their track record, he’s surprised at how quickly she reads his message.

 **Lotta:** sucks

 **Lotta:** i wanted to see if i could come and hang out with you?

 **Julian:** not today

 **Julian:** but i told my mum about us

 **Julian:** and she said she’d love to meet you

 **Julian:** i wonder if she’d recognise you?

 **Lotta:** i have seen her a few times

 **Lotta:** she looks really lovely

 **Julian:** she is. strict though

His mother’s words from the previous night ring in his ears and he knows he should tell her about the offer, but then she tells him she has to go, promises to message him as soon as she's done, and then she’s gone to do whatever, and she has no idea that Julian collapses against his pillows and groans about his predicament. The way his heart sunk when his mother spoke about inviting Lotta over and the insinuation of them being alone together, the fact that sexually-motivated comments will begin to head in their direction (most likely before they’ve even kissed) and he finds himself dreading his first time.

The humidity of mid-afternoon is sticky in the air as he tries to complete his history essay while ignoring Jannis’ infrequent knocks and requests to play football in the garden. The first few times his phone buzzes he manages to curb his curious streak and will himself to concentrate, however when the incoming messages become irritatingly frequent, he throws his pen down and opens his phone.

It’s the football group chat Lotta was added to at school.

Lewis has asked them all to come out the next day after school and meet in the park like old times, and Julian briefly gets entangled in the conversation before the threat of the overdue essay clobbers him on the head and he makes himself switch his internet connection off and turn back to the American Civil War.

By the time he’s finished, the chat has died down with over one hundred messages unread that Julian can’t be asked to go back and read. But then the notification of a mention somewhere in the chat catches his attention, and his phone jumps to it.

 **Lotta:** i’ll come

 **Dan:** nice!! probably won’t be the only way you come, right jule ;)

He groans audibly, loud enough for Jannis to come sauntering into his bedroom with a football still in hand (fucking hell, Julian thinks, has he really been waiting a hundred minutes just to play football?), and tries not to think about Lotta ‘having to go,’ and subsequently texting his friends right in front of his face.

“Are you finished now?”

“Depends what way you mean.” He shoots back, easily catching the ball Jannis is definitely aiming to hit his head with and grinning at the face his brother pulls, “but yeah, I am.”

“Do you want to come and play football now?”

“Only to get you to leave me alone.”

Jannis flips him off and kicks an empty folder Julian’s left on his floor before flouncing out of the room. Julian can’t stop himself from checking his phone for another text from Lotta, but there’s nothing, so he gives up and follows his brother out into the garden. Jannis is kicking a ball against the shed once he’s pulled his shoes on, and they begin by practicing penalties against its wooden wall.

“Careful!” Their dad shouts absent-mindedly from the living room when one of Jannis’ shots goes a little high and almost lofts over the fence. Jannis is an appalling goalkeeper, so every single one of Julian’s shots hit the precise spot he challenges himself to hit, but once whatever program his dad’s watching ends, he’s out of the door and boldly proclaiming something about how he’s going to “show my future professional son how it’s done.”

The three of them alternate for a while (and Julian could _swear_ his dad and Jannis are teaming up against him) before his dad says about going inside to help their mother with the cooking, throwing the ball against Julian’s forehead as he heads back towards the house.

It’s still muggy, so the two of them play for a little while longer before the wind picks up out of nowhere and starts skewing their shots off target.

“Let’s stop,” Jannis says, sitting down on the grass and motioning for Julian to do the same. They’re quiet for a few minutes, Julian listening intently to the ripple of the wind in the trees, before his brother breaks the serenity again, “when did you get your girlfriend?”

“Thursday. She writes articles at Oberhausen.”

“That’s how you met?”

“No, she’s just joined my biology and history classes at school as well.”

Jannis nods, considering, “what do you like about her?”

“I don’t think there’s a specific thing,” he admits, because it sounds a lot better than _I don’t actually know_ (he’s pretty sure that the moment she said yes, all memory of his thoughts on her prior to that dissipated), “we just get on really well.”

“Took you a while,” Jannis laughs and it takes Julian a moment to realise he’s mocking his inexperience.

“Not all of us can be wannabe Casanovas like you. Speaking of which, how are things with Tatjana’s sister?”

“You mean Emma? Good, I guess. We sat together at lunch the other day.”

“Practically married already,” Julian deadpans, allowing his brother to go off into a meticulous analysis of Emma while he overthinks about his former inability to like women, and how that’s caused his current predicament of not knowing what to do next.

Like he can read his mind, Jannis suddenly juts out of his speech, “when are you going to sleep with her?”

“Why are you asking me that?” Julian exclaims way too quickly, “um, yeah, I don’t know, it’s none of your business anyway.”

“Worth it to see you get flustered like that,” Jannis jokes just as their dad calls them in for dinner, “by the way, you better start getting some moans together for that phone sex you’ll be having when you’re in Wolfsburg.”

He doesn’t get to check his phone before dinner, so he spends the entire meal avoiding Jannis’ eyes and hoping that Lotta has messaged in the time he’s been gone. Luckily, Jascha makes it easy for him and doesn’t spend the entire time talking instead of eating, so it’s not long before they’ve finished and his brothers and him do the washing up.

His phone lights up with a text from his girlfriend the precise moment he grabs it from the desk. 

**Lotta:** hey

 **Julian:** hey. how are you?

 **Lotta:** pretty good. do we have any homework for schmidt tomorrow?

**Julian:** i hope not because i haven’t done any

He texts her for an hour and it’s almost like his doubts vanish with every joke she sends him before she’s called to dinner and suddenly, Julian’s really excited to have her in the group.

She comes into biology the next morning and immediately smiles at him, taking her seat and pulling something out of her bag.

“I brought my boots,” she says, “Lewis told me he would dispossess me at least ten times during the match.”

“You’ll show him,”

“Of course,” Lotta grins, waving at Francia when she trails into the room. “Where are we playing?”

“At the park about ten minutes away.” He wonders if he should invite her back to his after the game, but he knows exactly what Dan and Lukas would say if he sees them leaving together and swallows the sentiment. “Where do you play?”

“Central midfield,” she answers, glancing away as Schmidt enters the room dramatically, “that’s why I was challenging Lewis.”

“It’s been years since I’ve played with them,” he tells her, “back in second year we used to play almost every day, both in school and after, but since I went to Oberhausen and quit the school team, I don’t really see them much anymore. I’m looking forward to it.”

“Lewis mentioned you didn’t play with them much anymore,” she mumbles, turning her attention to the board as Schmidt begins the lesson.

“When there was an odd number, the team with me on it would have one less player,” he tells her like she’s supposed to do something with the information. He can’t help but feel a little put out when she breathes a laugh and continues writing, attention clearly elsewhere. He tries to channel her work ethic, but he makes eye contact with Thomas across the room (who still plays in goal for the school team) and ends up spending most of the lesson communicating about the later match through hand gestures.

Around one in the afternoon the sky darkens threateningly, but the rain holds off and finally the bell rings for the end of the day. His teacher holds them back for a couple of minutes to rant about their continuous chatter throughout the lesson (which they all spend pretending to listen) so the group has already convened by the school gates by the time Julian and Dan arrive. He can hear some of them holler, teasing them for being late, but Julian’s eyes lock on Lotta and Lewis on the edge of the group, lost in conversation and she’s laughing up at him. It’s unfair of him, he knows, the feeling of bitter annoyance seeping into him and he knows he’s being melodramatic when he strides straight up to her and places an arm around her shoulder, smiling down at her and trying not to let the indescribably negative feeling overcome him when he sees Lewis raise his eyebrows at his girlfriend.

The teams are decided on the walk from school, Lewis demanding that he faces off with Lotta in central midfield. Julian ends up on her team with Thomas in goal. After the serious conversation dies down and Lukas starts quietly berating a couple of the team members for squirting a water bottle at him, Lotta starts telling Julian a story about her maths class, yet as they enter the park, she cuts herself off when Lewis takes the football out of his bag and kicks it into the open space. It’s only a couple of minutes before the game kicks off.

Julian hates it, because Lewis and Lotta are true to their word and keep trying to take each other out and all he can hear is the way she laughs at him when he misses his tackle and careers into her, sending them both over. Lewis springs to his feet and helps her up before Julian even moves a muscle. 

Lotta’s an amazing footballer and Julian can see the way Dan’s face brightens in awe when she rounds him effortlessly and slots the ball past the other keeper. Julian sprints over to her immediately.

“That was so good!” He yells, picking her up off the ground slightly and comforting himself with the squeal of protest she lets out as he feels the gentle feeling over her arms around him.

“Put me down!” She exclaims and he does dutifully, turning to find the rest of the group laughing at him and feels his cheeks warm. “It’s your turn to get a goal now, anyway.”

“Guess that’s me told,” he says to his laughing friends.

The highlight of the game comes when Lotta nicks the ball off Lewis (Julian thinks she sends a teasing comment in his direction, but the wind drowns it out) and sends a long ball through to him which he finishes easily, and his girlfriend runs towards him and jumps into his arms. Her hair is falling out of her ponytail, shorter hair messily framing her flushed face and she’s beautiful like this, light in his arms.

Droplets of rain begins to splatter as the game slows to its end and some of the team head home before it gets worse. Some of them make suggestive comments at him and Lotta that make him forget how to speak in embarrassment, but Lewis stays until they’re the only three left. Julian pretends not to notice the way his former captain is definitely getting ready to leave slower than normal.

“What are you doing for Abi?” He asks Lotta and they’re off again, switching to too-fast English for Julian to keep up with, before Lewis says something Julian catches about having to go for a trial at a new football club.

“Where?”

“Oberhausen, with Julian. Well, with Julian for now.”

He couldn’t miss the confusion in Lotta’s face as she looks at him, and he’s in half a mind to bolt. Nevertheless, his girlfriend turns back to Lewis and begins talking about her role in the club. He makes his way off eventually and it’s just the two of them and suddenly watching a raindrop run along a leaf is fascinating.

“Julian?” Lotta says when they’re almost back at her house, “what did Lewis mean earlier?”

“I have an offer from Wolfsburg,” he blurts out, “I haven’t agreed to go yet. I want to stay because of you---,”

“But you want to go because it’s your dream to be professional footballer.”

He nods. He can’t look her in the eyes, because if he does and she’s hurt, he wouldn’t know what to do. She stops, disregarding the warm summer rain and the steamy, overripe air, reaching for his hand.

He doesn’t know why he can’t do it, _this_ , right.

“I understand,” she says softly, and really, he’s a fucking idiot for not telling her sooner, “when do you leave?”

“If I agree--,”

“When you agree,” she corrects, “because I can’t let you turn this down because of me.”

He nods again, swallowing, “end of the school year.”

“That’s only four weeks,” she mumbles, sounding like it’s more to herself than him, “I think we should see if this is worth it. I think we could manage it if you really wanted to. But we both have to be sure.”

“You’re right,” he says, hoping she can’t see his nervousness at being alone with her because he feels painfully awkward and part of him wants to text Jannis and ask him if it’s normal to be like this when his thoughts have seemingly done a 180 from two weeks ago.

The mental flip-flopping is giving him whiplash and he definitely spends too long contemplating it, because Lotta leans up on her tiptoes and places a kiss on his lips before whispering a goodbye and heading inside.

For a week, Julian can dispel all doubts by just attempting to conjure up the ghost of the feeling of Lotta kissing him and the way he felt as she shut the front door behind her, like part of him found some part of her incomprehensible. He tries to get her alone every single day for the rest of the week, but it’s futile with the exception of two stolen minutes in the corridor outside of the maths department in the middle of class. As a result, the prospect of being alone with her becomes daunting and he finds himself avoiding her unless they’re in a group.

By Tuesday, he’s sure she can tell, and he signs the Wolfsburg contract with ink dripping with guilt.

He’s only got two and a half weeks left, the news of his transfer breaking within school and suddenly he’s thrust into the social limelight as Lotta gets pushed further and further away from him. He’s racked with the knowledge of how he’s unintentionally treated her every time she meets his eyes, so when he invites her to join him at Lukas’ house, he’s pretty sure they both know it’s a final bid to save their relationship.

Nevertheless, it’s quite sweet when she rests her head in his lap after taking a swig from the bottle of vodka the three of them are passing around. Lukas spontaneously invited Tatjana and is standing at the mirror, fretting over a choice of shirts while Dan is in the bathroom.

“He’s still doing this?” Dan says, exasperated, when he returns. “Bro, just wear the shirt she complimented you on. She’ll notice.”

Before Lukas can voice one of the four protests he’s come up with and has repeated on loop, Lotta pipes up, “she will. Fucking hell, people say girls are bad when it comes to choosing outfits? I have never met a girl as bad as this.”

“We’re not all like this,” Julian says, playing with a stray lock of her hair, “Lukas is just a special case.”

Dan snorts as Lukas turns around, bare-chested; flipping him off before accepting the bottle of vodka Julian passes him as mollification. Tatjana only lives two streets away and must send Lukas a text of her departure, because suddenly Julian’s best friend’s cheeks transcend through several shades of scarlet as he checks his phone, taking another long sip from the bottle.

“There won’t be any left at this rate!” Dan protests and Julian’s pretty sure the two of them are going to end up in some play-fight before the ring of the doorbell pierces loudly through the room.

“She’s here!” Lukas yells, “fuck, is my hair done right?”

“Never mind that,” Dan says, half-shoving Lukas out of his bedroom, “we’ll be back in a minute!”

Julian looks down at Lotta, face already flushed from the alcohol she’s drunk as she smiles blearily at something on her phone, and he’s finally able to put what he’s feeling into something kind of coherent. He likes her, he really does, but there’s something intangible holding him back that’s driving a rut between them and somehow, he knows the gap is unbridgeable. 

He opens his mouth to speak, but just as he gets her name out, Lukas comes crashing back into the room, Dan and Tatjana following him.

“Tatjana bought scotch!” Lukas exclaims far too loudly and it takes all of Julian’s composure not to cringe when his best friend begins talking ferociously quickly at Tatjana. He catches Lotta’s quizzical glances and has to promise to tell her later; reaping dread when his girlfriend leans further into his chest when he knows it’s coming to an end.

Pink streaks of dusk litter the sky before it fades to deep blue in sync with the sharpness of Julian’s gaze disappearing with his blood swimming in alcohol. Lukas has somehow garnered the courage to wrap an arm around Tatjana’s shoulder and he thinks he can make out Dan’s underhand comments about being a fifth wheel, but he falls back against Lukas’ pillows with Lotta in his arms, and it’s weirdly the most relaxed he’s been in weeks.

His girlfriend jolts and falls asleep on his chest as Tatjana turns her phone light on. It creates a yellowish hue in the room and without the niggling doubt, Julian finds himself placing kisses on Lotta’s head and silently challenging Lukas to do the same.

“Let’s play truth or dare,” Lukas says later, when both Julian and Dan are too drunk to make a comment. Tatjana nods silently. “Julian,”

“Dare,”

“I dare you to wake your girlfriend up by making out with her.”

He knows it’s only going to make it hurt more, but he ditches all reason and leans down, kissing Lotta gently and tasting the dregs of vodka on her lips until she wakes up with smudged lipstick and a half-groan.

“What the fuck?” Lotta says with a husk in her voice that Julian knows should arouse him more than it does, but then she registers Julian above her and before he can breathe, she’s running her fingers through his messy curls and is leaning up to kiss him properly. “Hey,” she says when they pull apart.

“Hey,” he whispers, smiling gently at the intoxicated twinkle in her eye. 

He might be the worst person in the world for doing this to her.

“Okay, lovebirds!” Lukas yells, “Julian, ask someone!”

“Which one?” He says back.

He sees the way Lukas’ cheeks flush red, even with the hazy glow of intoxication as his best friend mumbles, “dare.”

“Kiss your crush. We all know she’s here.” Dan says, and it’s obvious the moment Tatjana realises who they’re talking about, yet Julian can’t help but feel a sense of pride when he notices her lean into his best friend like she wants him.

Lotta squeals when they kiss. Even Dan stops talking and lets Lukas live out his dream, and even though Tatjana flicks her hair back like it’s no big deal when they pull apart, Julian can see the sparkle in her mannerism.

Julian laughs so hard he cries when Dan is forced to recount the story of how he lost his virginity, Lotta strips down to her underwear (Julian takes a shot to dispel the persistent thoughts and prays he looks like he’s willing his dick to soften) and suddenly the evening merges into a drunken mess and the only thing he can picture is the fact that Tatjana and Lukas are kissing again when he’s pretty sure no one dared them to.

His words to Lotta stick in his throat. He knows his friends are expecting him to take her back to his house and have sex with her, he can see the smirk on Lukas’ face, but when Tatjana and Lotta link arms and begin singing the drunkest rendition of Hero he’s ever heard, Julian knows he couldn’t broach the topic even if he had the words to say.

The night wind is harsh from the moment they step out of Lukas’ house at two in the morning. Lotta fell asleep again, so Julian has her slung over his arms as Dan runs ahead, yelling disjointed thoughts into the darkness. 

Lotta’s house is twenty minutes away, but it takes them much longer because Julian can barely see and Dan insists on taking a million photos of Julian and Lotta by every second streetlight. His girlfriend shakes herself awake by the time they’re halfway there (he guesses), wrapping both arms around Julian’s neck as if she’s trying to walk as an attachment to his body. It’s pleasantly warm and frighteningly misleading. Her breath ripples against the crook of his neck.

“Hey,” she says loudly, “you’re really cute.”

He tries to make himself sound like he isn’t dying inside when he replies, but he can see in Dan’s facial expression that his best friend has cottoned on instinctively, and he knows he is completely fucked. Lotta’s rambling on about all the things she wants to do to him, and part of him tells himself he has to hold out for her sake, right up until somewhere in her drunken state, she stops talking about him and starts talking about Lewis.

He knows he should be more cut up about it than he is. He drops her off at her house wordlessly, wincing when he’s caught in the crossfire of the iron glare Dan is shooting at her.

“You okay?” Dan says, the second he’s sure the Schneiders won’t be able to hear him, “she was describing in detail what she’d do to him---,”

“I heard,” Julian snaps. Dan stares at him awkwardly as a gust of humid wind rushes in his ears, and he’s almost home before he conjures up the courage to say anything else. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve been doubting this relationship for a couple of weeks,” he pauses, unwilling to admit that it’s been since almost the second they got together, “and to hear that almost sounds like confirmation that she doesn’t want me either.”

“Talk to her in the morning.” Dan says, “don’t keep this up until you go to Wolfsburg. It’ll just make something that could be civil deteriorate into fallout.”

“Yeah,” the sudden feeling of sobriety is jarring and part of him wants to lie down on the pavement and stare at the stars until they disappear. It’d be easier than his predicament.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dan says when they reach Julian’s doorstep, “it’ll only make you put yourself through it twice. Go and get some sleep.”

“Thanks. I’ll go over to her house in the morning.” His hand trembles as he fumbles with the key in the lock, flipping off Dan when his best friend’s laugh is loud in the silence. “Goodnight.”

For the first time in his life, he wants to wake up with a vicious hangover and put off breaking up with Lotta (for all his doubts, he still can’t rid his imagination of the way her face lit up slowly when he admitted he had a crush on her), but he’s pretty sure the short conversation of honesty with Dan drained every unit of alcohol from his body because he wakes up with nothing but the feeling of sick dread sitting low in his stomach. It’s eleven in the morning, and his phone buzzes relentlessly with unanswered texts when he turns it on.

 **Lotta:** are you awake yet??

 **Lotta:** i need to come and see you

On his group chat with Dan and Lukas, his best friends are already awake and Lukas is retelling everything that happened with Tatjana. He types out something that he hopes makes sense and reopens his thread with his girlfriend.

 **Julian:** i’m awake now

 **Julian:** do you want me to come over to yours?

 **Lotta:** you can do

 **Julian:** i’ll be fifteen minutes

He throws on clothes that he hopes match and traipses down into the kitchen, muttering a good morning to his mother who he thinks is already making a start on lunch and grabs his keys he discarded on the side table the night before. He’s pretty sure his mother calls his name as the door shuts behind him, but he throws the hood of his jacket over his head and doesn’t turn back.

He spends the entire walk in a state of disinhibition. Nothing goes through his head as he kicks a stone for a couple of hundred metres along a winding path of the Bremen outskirts. Maybe it’s better this way.

Lotta’s eyes are underlined by smudges of the previous night’s makeup when she opens the door. There’s an awkward standoff before she pulls the door open wider and says, “you should come in,” under her breath. Her house is deserted save for them, and Julian hopes he hasn’t misread her completely and that she isn’t expecting something like sex. But then she speaks, not meeting his eyes, and it turns out her subject matter is excruciatingly painful in the fresh light of day.

“I don’t know where to start, but I need to talk to you about all the things I said last night. I feel absolutely terrible because I was conscious when I was talking about him, everything was making sense, I could see,” she exhales in something that sounds like a laugh reserved for the worst hurt. Julian’s throat clams under the weight of her words. “I guess I’m a masochist, because I loved the look on your face when I started talking about Lewis, and the worst part is I could’ve stopped if I wanted to, and I didn’t. So firstly, I’m sorry for that.”

“Why Lewis, though?” He gets out first, because it’s short and it’ll give him time to clarify everything that’s going on in his head, all the fucking feelings that the blush on her face is bringing back when he’s told himself he’s got to break up with her. He doesn’t know why he’s so obsessed with hurting himself, when he steels himself to hold their eye contact and practically watch Lotta become less and less interested in him by the minute.

“Do you remember the Abi meeting? I’d actually been at school that day, I don’t know if you saw me.” He briefly racks his brains for thoughts of her, but there’s nothing. “Lewis sat next to me in my first period, and he kept an eye out for me ever since. I’d watched you train before and I thought you were really cute, and I was so happy to be sat next to you in biology. You were really sweet and seemed to take a genuine interest in me, so I said yes when you asked me out.”

“Okay,” he says, because she’s making him feel like she’s waiting for his acceptance, the feeling of an imminent attack on him growing with every second she remains silent.

“Lewis kept being lovely to me, but I promise I never tried anything with him, even when part of me felt like you were just with me for the label.”

“I promise it was never like that,” he rushes, “I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me.”

“So I wasn’t imagining it,” she says, and suddenly she looks the most calm she’s been all day. 

“No,” he says, and it’s like a weight off his shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

Julian feels a growing sense of rage at the way she smiles innocently at him, and it’s the first time he sees a trace of malice behind her brown eyes. His voice wobbles scarily close to raising when he continues,

“I think we should break up. I’m leaving anyway, and from what you’ve told me it sounds like you’d rather be with Lewis---,”

“I agree.”

He waits five minutes for her to say anything, but she barely even breathes. Her eyes never leave his face, as if she’s challenging him to fuck knows what, so he stammers out, “I think I should go,” and doesn’t even wait for her to show him out.

The first thing he sees when he opens the door is his grandma talking to Jannis and he remembers that he was supposed to set the table for dinner. He’s just about to apologise when his dad spots him and greets him with,

“Julian.”

“I broke up with Lotta,” he says quickly, by way of explanation. “She kept talking about having sex with this other guy last night and I didn’t want to dump her by text. I’m sorry I didn’t set the table and that I wasn’t here for Oma and Opa arriving---,”

“Julian,” his father says, “I was just going to tell you that we received the acceptance from the new school in Wolfsburg.” His heart sinks when his grandfather opens his mouth, because he knows what’s coming.

“You shouldn’t be distracted by women. In my day, we focused on our studies, and women came later….”

The next day, he notices people giggling as they whisper, eyes trained on him. Lukas’ face is pale, despite his arm around Tatjana, when Julian arrives at their spot on the field at lunchtime. Lewis isn’t with them, despite the rest of the team, all of whom are looking at Julian with a blatant weariness. He sees Jannis arguing with his friends in the distance, body language rigid in defence, and Julian just about manages to pick up his name in the wind.

“What’s going on?”

“Lotta’s been going around saying she thinks you’re gay.” Lukas admits. “Tatjana’s trying to get her to stop, but she won’t listen.”

“She’s a cunt,” Tatjana interjects. 

“Why?”

“Apparently you ‘acted gay’ in your relationship with her. She’s been saying you’ve used her as a cover up to get the Wolfsburg contract. People believe it.” Dan says, “we’re denying it to anyone who asks us, but you know how shitty people can be.”

His blush reaches stains his neck when he sits next to her in last period biology. She doesn’t say a word to him, talking loudly to Francia about a party Lewis is hosting on Saturday and disregarding all of the warnings Schmidt gives her. He calls Julian back after class, questions him within an inch of his life of the possible reasons for Lotta’s sudden complete personality change. He doesn’t say anything to give them away, but he’s pretty sure his teacher knows he is part of the reason.

He bunks off after second lesson the next day, and barely attends school at all in his final week in Bremen. Dan throws a goodbye party for him, where he spends the whole evening trying not to punch the lights out of Lewis, but before he knows it, he’s in the car with his mother who’s holding back her tears.

He’s been in Wolfsburg a couple of weeks when Lotta posts a photo of her and Lewis on Instagram, and Julian can’t even bring himself to be surprised.

* * *

_**wolfsburg, germany (2014)** _

“Did you find the answer to how water moves into the xylem?” Noah asks from where he’s hanging off the side of his bed, biology textbook balanced precariously on his chest. They’ve only been studying for a little over half an hour, but they’ve already managed to strew paper over almost every surface in Noah’s bedroom.

“Yeah,” Julian says, reciting the page on symplastic and apoplastic pathways from the website he’s loaded on Noah’s laptop. He’s been in Wolfsburg for two years, and Noah’s been his best friend since his first day at school. Time has melted away and Julian knows that all he’s got to do is complete the exams (which begin in under two weeks) before he speaks to the directors of the Wolfsburg academy about where his career is heading.

“Bro, I’m so fucked,” Noah sighs when Julian finishes speaking. “There’s so much shit to learn.”

“You’ll be fine, you’re one of the cleverest people I know.”

“Doesn’t matter if I don’t deliver in the exam,” Noah shoots back, flipping over so he’s lying on his stomach and grabbing a notebook from the pile of stuff on the floor. He’s quiet for a moment while he writes something, before he sighs again and looks back up at Julian, “you must be chill though, what with the whole moving to the first team.”

“The exams are still important, I need the back up route if I get a career-ending injury,” Julian says, “but I get that it’s slightly less important for me than it is for the rest of you.”

“What’s the latest with the contract talks anyway?” Noah looks away, scrabbling against the paper on his bed in search of something before glancing back at him, and suddenly Julian finds himself struck dumb.

“I-I don’t know,” he chokes out, body spiralling into panic because he’s never noticed the way Noah carries himself when his best friend stretches his back. Noah goes on to talk about root pressure and Julian finds himself actively averting his eyes from staring at his lips.

He chokes on the water he drinks too fast to try and rid himself of the thought. He stares at the words on the website, yet he’s fucking hyper fixated on him and Noah’s tiniest movements are amplified in his peripheral vision. Everything swims in his vision, Noah’s voice is torture to listen to, and Julian can’t fucking focus.

Blood burns in his veins when his mind drifts off to what kissing Noah would be like, running a hand along his dark skin and feeling his best friend’s stubble rub gently against his face.

His phone clatters against the desk with a new message, cutting Noah off from his one-sided conversation. It’s just his mother, asking him what time training finishes that night so he can call home, but the feeling of the walls closing in on him intensifies when he meets Noah’s gaze and he realises he has to get out of there.

“It’s coach,” he says, hoping Noah doesn’t notice the tremor in his voice, “training’s extended tonight, I need to leave now.”

“Alright,” Noah says, finally getting off the bed and handing Julian his textbook back. “This hasn’t happened before.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s been some disciplinary issues,” he says quickly, coming very close to breaking the zip on his backpack in his haste to get out. “See you tomorrow, thanks for letting me come over.”

“You too, bro.” Noah says to his back as he makes his way out of his bedroom. None of Noah’s family are home, so Julian lets himself out and walks out of sight before stopping, leaning against a wall and trying to calm his erratic heartbeat.

He briefly wonders if he’s caught something. That would explain the way his body feels like it’s on fire and the terrifying spinning sensation as the streets of Wolfsburg rotate slowly around him, but it does nothing to explain the thoughts of wanting to _kiss_ Noah and run his fingers down his neck. He sprints down the road towards his apartment block, bag bouncing uncomfortably on his back, and crashes down onto his sofa, trying to stop the dizzy feeling of nausea reverberating through his body.

To try and erase the thoughts from his mind, he gets ready for training and ends up pacing around his living room, cleats tapping satisfyingly against the varnish of the wooden floor as the clock on the mantlepiece ticks monotonously. The car park at the training complex is completely deserted when he pulls up forty minutes early, killing the time by playing some games on his phone before his trance is broken by one of his teammates tapping a stone against the wingmirror of his car.

Football has always been his one distraction (aside from the days of Lotta, which still send a painful shudder down his back whenever his remembers her name and her brown eyes that hid her venom) so he isn’t surprised that he feels better instantaneously when his feet reach the soft grass of the training pitch. Some of his friends are laughing at what happened the other night, when they were all seemingly drunk out of their minds at a nightclub (Julian was holed up in his bedroom, studying) so he takes the bait and quizzes them about it to stop himself dwelling on whatever the fuck happened back in Noah’s room.

“Good session,” his coach says, slapping him on the back as he reaches down to pick up some of the equipment, “when’s your first Abi exam?”

“Two weeks today.”

“Do you think you’re ready?”

“I hope I will be by then,” he jokes back, “I still need to buy my suit for the ball as well.”

“Leaving it to the last minute,” one of his teammates, Sami, yells from across the group, “typical Jule.”

“Fuck off, I bet you did too.”

“Nah, Maria would never let me.”

“I bet she made you wear matching ties,” another teammate jokes, and when Sami confirms it, and Julian falls about laughing to hide the nervousness creeping back into his mind. From the moment he joined the team, his teammates have been so lovely, but pretty much all of them are throwing him confused glances.

Julian’s not in the matchday squad for the next three weeks to focus on his Abitur, so he gets to leave training early while the rest of the team is forced into the auditorium for analysis. They’re playing the youth side of Bayer Leverkusen at the weekend, so they’ll be watching videos of all their best attackers while Julian drives home, listening to the content for his German oral in the car. He’s in the process of cooking dinner when his phone starts ringing with the video call from his mother, so he feigns happiness while she and Jannis quiz him about his studies for Abitur before going on to inform him about the new camera Jannis has bought in order to pursue his photography career. It’s only nine once they hang up, but it’s not like he can sit and text Noah for hours like usual and he’d rather die than do any more studying, so he makes himself a cup of tea and heads to bed.

The tension for the upcoming exams has been increasing over the course of their final year at school, yet when Julian walks through the doors the next morning he’s pretty sure he could reach out and grab some. It doesn’t help that he’s running slightly late, so he doesn’t get chance to compose himself for his first lesson and has to head straight there, slipping silently into his seat next to Noah.

“Hey bro,” his best friend says, doing their handshake when he’s finished writing the date, “how was training last night?”

“Decent. The rest of the lads had to do the analysis shit,”

“Who are they playing?”

“Leverkusen on Saturday. It’ll be a test,” Julian says, scraping the legs of his chair against the floor as he begins the revision task their teacher has laid out for them. He tries to tune Noah out as his best friend rambles on about something his mother had a go at him for, because the one time he does glance up, Noah is chewing his lip and his thoughts from yesterday douse him like freezing water.

He’s lucky that a fight breaks out between two kids a couple of years below them during lunch, distracting all of his friends and giving him the tiniest respite from concealing his inner turmoil. His thoughts jumble, but he’s pretty sure they consist of telling himself he can’t be gay and even worse, that he can’t have a crush on Noah, not with exams two weeks away and the memories of Lotta rendering him essentially terrified of relationships anyway.

Noah sits on the opposite side of the classroom during their sport class last period, so Julian ignores him by honing his attention in on his work and pretending not to hear the texts his best friend is definitely sending him.

He struggles along for about a week (praying no one notices the dark circles under his eyes from one too many sleepless nights resulting in his researching basically everything to do with homosexuality under the sun) before Noah finally corners him one lunchtime. He’d hidden away under the guise of a revision session, but Noah had walked past him sitting by a stairwell and dragged him out into the field.

“If you’ve got a problem with me, you better fucking say something,” Noah says, “exams are next week, and I don’t have time for this shit.”

“You haven’t done anything. It’s just the stress of exams and the whole--- the whole football career thing getting to me.”

“Are you sure?”

Julian nods, feeling his throat run dry at the proximity. Noah’s hair is still slightly messy from their football practical assessment earlier in the day and Julian drops his gaze again, embarrassed.

“Is there something else?”

The dryness in his throat starts to burn.

“No,” his voice is suffocated and speaking hurts, “I think I’m coming down with something, that’s all.”

“Don’t you dare pass it on to me,” Noah jokes, taking a step back and it only slightly helps Julian to feel like he can breathe again, “make sure you’re okay for the exams though, bro. You’ve worked really hard and I would hate for you to do badly.”

“Thanks,” Julian coughs, “um, you too.”

Noah smiles, slinging an arm over his shoulders, completely oblivious to the way Julian’s neck is in mock agony where the point of skin-on-skin contact is. His arm stays there for the whole walk back over to the rest of the group, who barely even acknowledge their arrival.

Julian goes home and screams into his textbook. A million thoughts go into overdrive; there isn’t time for this, I can’t give up on my dream of being a footballer, I’ve sacrificed so much; they run mockingly around his head and when he falls against the back his chair, he sees them written tauntingly over his walls.

He’s been let off from training entirely to focus on revision, but still finds himself kicking a football against the empty wall of his living room to try and take his mind off things. His friends are ranting about one of their old teachers missing out half the course content on their group chat, Noah being particularly vocal, and Julian’s really fucked when he notices he can barely even read his name without shaking.

Lotta never felt this awful.

Tape recordings of his subject courses save his life when he ends up staring out of his apartment window, watching the sun slip below the horizon as the darkness engulfs Wolfsburg, watching the flicker of his own eyes in the glass. It’s still the same face he’s grown up with, yet Julian can see the way the confusion is eating into him, threatening to explode outwards and for the world to know who he really is. He’s gay, Lotta was right, of course she was fucking right, because now that he thinks of it, he realises she has been the only woman to ever have any romantic impact on him ever.

He chastises himself for even daring to hope the football world may be more accepting than before. It’s not even the kind of topic he’d dare to approach with his teammates.

It’s the moment he thinks he’s signing himself up for twenty years of secrecy. 

In actuality, it’s a miracle his secret lasts for just about the entirety of the exam period. The exams themselves are awful, kicking his heels as the room gets gradually hotter as time ticks by. Halfway through one of his biology papers, he sits up and makes eye contact with Noah, and he’s definitely blaming that as the reason for the long answer he was midway through writing turning into a completely incomprehensible piece of shit.

They’re not in school during exams, so it’s easier for him to hide away from everyone, only having to suffer the conversations with Noah before they enter the halls. He knows his best friend is keeping an eye on him, has caught him observing him quietly, wonders whether Noah can see his knees weaken when Julian sees his eyes trained on him.

Lying to his friends is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, especially when everything has finally started to make sense. As a result, he fakes exhaustion not even two hours into the post-exam celebration they have at one of the Wolfsburg nightclubs, he barely taking five minutes to write bland responses to the messages of congratulations he’s received while he was there once he’s home, before he opens the bag of alcohol in his wardrobe and immediately downs a bottle of cider.

The glass remains of his escape lie in a clanking mess at the foot of his bed as he gets continuously drunker, barely even taking the time to celebrate being finished with school as he pops the lid of another bottle. It’s destructive bliss, he thinks, as he lies against his pillows and even manages to enjoy the way his ceiling malforms above him, appreciative of the way it seems to wash out of his problems.

It all turns to shit when he downs a bottle of pure vodka. His throat burns and he begins spluttering inelegantly, thinking for a few horrific seconds that he’s about to throw it all back up, keeling over the tub he’s grabbed just in case. When he thinks he’s safe, he tries to grab for the bedpost, but the world jerks violently and he’s flung face-first onto his duvet.

The corner of his phone digs into his ribs. He manages to unlock it, and then the alcohol hits his head and he spins out of consciousness. It’s the strangest feeling of knowing he’s texting someone, knowing he’s awake and alive and yet having absolutely no control over his actions. In a crazy way, it’s almost dreamlike.

He can’t remember if the conversation has ended before he blacks out.

He comes to around one in the afternoon the following day with almost fifty unread messages. He scrolls through them bleary-eyed, cringing at the jokes his friends are saying on the group chat before opening the texts from Noah.

 **Noah:** i’d be down for that ;)

He can’t help frowning in confusion (before wincing at the way his head throbs as punishment) as he tries to discern the context behind Noah’s message. When he does, he’s grateful for the forethought he had to grab a tub because suddenly, he’s being horrendously sick over the side of his bed.

In his drunken state, he’s not only come out to Noah, he’s also confessed that he’s been dreaming about fucking him, and Noah was _responding._

It could, quite possibly, be the worst moment of his life. He wonders if he can take it back, but then he scrolls back further and discovers he’s explained everything in gross detail, and he knows his best friend will know there is no way a drunken mind could conjure that up.

He’s still recuperating from the shock and humiliation when his phone buzzes in his hand. Part of him wants to throw it at the wall and hibernate for the next three weeks, but his curiosity wins out, praying that it _isn’t Noah._

It isn’t Noah, but he’s not sure if it’s somehow managed to be even worse.

 **Lotta:** are you awake now?

He groans aloud as he opens the text, not caring that he’s leaving her on read as he reads through the hazy mix of capitalisation and misspelling from the previous night. His heart rate increases when he reads about booking a ticket back to Bremen to go and see her (which, with a quick check of his emails, he discovers he’s done for that night) before his mind falls upon the opening message.

 **Julian:** how did you knwo ik was gay befoew I did????

He can’t even bear to read her response and places his phone facedown on his bedside table, planting his face into his mattress in embarrassment before eventually managing to force himself out of bed. He cleans up the remains of his vomit, crinkling his nose at the vile stench, before collapsing down on his sofa.

“Jule?” Jannis says when he picks the phone up.

“Are you at home?” He says, knowing his voice is probably audibly ragged over the phone line.

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“I’m coming back for a couple of days tonight, before Abiball. Can you pick me up from the train station at nine?”

“Sure,” Jannis says, before stammering something about their mother needing help with the shopping. Julian’s pretty sure he hears the high-pitched giggle of a girl right before the line cuts dead.

He spends most of the afternoon staring at the ceiling before finally deciding to pack a backpack of clothes. He can’t stomach anything, and he’s pretty sure his blood alcohol level is too high to drive safely, so he leaves early and meanders the walk towards the Wolfsburg train station. He’d rather die than see anyone he knows, but he can’t avoid the feeling of surveillance as he collects his ticket and heads onto the platform.

He plays some quiet music on the journey, phone stuffed tight in his pocket to curb the urge to check it (or worse, reply to Lotta or Noah), struggling to stay awake for the journey to Bremen.

The wind’s intrusive chill strikes him when he climbs out of the train carriage. He hasn’t been home since Christmas, but he still isn’t expecting the hug Jannis pulls him into. It’s still light as they drive the short distance back to Julian’s childhood home, and Julian spends the whole journey terrified someone’s going to recognise him through the window.

His mother isn’t feeling well, so after she’s welcomed him in, she starts preparing to head to bed. Just as she’s pouring herself a drink, Jannis pipes up,

“Why did you come home so suddenly?”

Julian sighs, because his little brother’s question has piqued her curiosity and she’s glancing over her shoulder at him. “I got drunk last night and told someone something, so I’ve come home to sort it out. Also, I need to buy my suit for Abiball and wanted you two to come with me.”

“What did you tell that person?” His mother asks, grabbing her mug and coming down to sit next to him, “are you okay?”

“It’s nothing---,” he starts to say.

“Jannis, I think it’s better if you go now,” his mother says, but just as his brother begins to exit the room, Julian stops him.

“I’m gay, and I told Lotta that last night.”

The three seconds it takes for his mother to respond are the longest three seconds of his life. He’s just about to bolt from the room when she hugs him, whispering acceptance into his ear while Julian looks at Jannis, grinning, over her shoulder.

“Is there a boy?” She asks after taking a long sip of her tea (Julian’s pretty sure it’s aimed to disguise the lump in her throat, but he doesn’t say anything).

“No,” he lies.

His family acceptance helps him sleep when he knows he should be tearing himself up over the unanswered messages from Lotta and Noah. Morning comes far too soon, because he agreed to meet Lotta at eleven in a coffee shop in the town centre and it hits him that he isn’t ready to see her after all this time.

He subtly unfollowed her on social media at some point of their separation, so he ponders over if she’s still with Lewis as he trudges slowly to the meeting point. His eyes fall on her sitting by the window as he crosses the square, nursing a drink as she waits for him. The smell of coffee hits him the moment he passes through the doors, and he finds himself praying for the barista to take eternity to make his drink, deliberately not sending looks in Lotta’s direction.

He acts like he can’t see her to buy time.

“Julian!” she calls out eventually, so he fakes happiness and heads over to sit opposite her. His legs shake viciously as he pulls the chair out, so much so it’s a narrow escape to prevent their drinks going flying. When she looks at him, it’s then he’s truly able to comprehend just how much has changed since the last time he saw her in school two years ago.

He’s just about to open the conversation with something mundane when she says, “I’m sorry.”

There’s nothing to do other than look at her.

“Those things I said about you ‘acting gay,’ I should never have said them. I didn’t realise what an impact they’d have on you, and when Dan told me you’d stopped coming to school and moved to Wolfsburg because of the comments, I felt so terrible.”

“Why didn’t you contact me?”

“I didn’t know whether you would’ve wanted to hear from me,” she admits. He can see the effort she’s making to hold his gaze. “I know how awful that sounds because of what I did, so I told myself if I ever saw you again, I’d apologise. Not that I thought I would.”

He doesn’t have to forgive her, and he knows one apology isn’t going to magically rectify everything that happened between them, but at least it’s the tiniest fragment of peace. He doesn’t trust her, hasn’t trusted anyone as much because of her, but it’s the smallest bit of gratification.

“Okay. How’s Lewis?”

“Why should I know?” she says, before placing her head in her hands and sighing, “do you want to know the really ironic bit?”

“What?”

“I’m a lesbian. Everyone knows, but it wasn’t until I came out that I realised the severity of what I’d said about you. Lewis hates me now.”

“I guess that’s taught you more than anything I could say to you.”

“It has. I genuinely am so sorry.” Julian nods, pulling his phone out and discreetly following her on Instagram while she gets a refill of coffee.

“Tell me about Lewis,” he says once she sits back down. The tension between them has faded into something close to close acquaintanceship, and it’s then he’s able to look at her and notice that she’s somehow even more beautiful than she was when they parted.

“I started realising I liked girls at roughly the same time he realised he could utilise his position as captain of the football team and a player in a football academy to try and earn one-night stands at house parties. I kept forgiving him whenever I’d see him kissing other girls, until one day I walked in on him fucking someone else and that was it. I took time to introspect, and discovered I wasn’t actually attracted to men at all. He blames me for tampering his respect.”

“Is he still at Oberhausen?”

She shakes her head, and he’s pretty sure he can see the faint trace of a smug smile on her lips, “he got kicked out after they uncovered the cheating scandal. I kept hearing the coach complaining about him in the hallways after sessions, so I can say for a fact he rubbed everyone up the wrong way.”

Julian can’t stop the faint trace of sympathy for his former captain creeping into his thoughts when Lotta continues on about him, but then he snaps back to attention and _looks_ at her, and the thought vanishes. 

“What made you realise?” Lotta says suddenly.

Something dries up uncomfortably in his throat under her gaze, even when she starts apologising profusely for being so direct. The memory of the first time he noticed how much he wanted to kiss Noah and run his hand over his gorgeous dark skin jolts through him uncomfortably, his blood running like ice through his body and his heart is beating too quick. 

“I started thinking about kissing my best friend,” he admits scratchily, “and I told him last night.”

“Is that why you were drunk? What did he say?”

“I told him while I was drunk,” he says, and the moment Lotta comprehends what he says is so clear it’s almost funny.

“Have you spoken to him since?”

“No, and I think it’s part of the reason I ended up here.”

“You need to talk to him,” she begins, and it’s like she still knows him implicitly because she immediately says, “I know that seems like the hardest thing, but you can’t avoid him forever.”

“Watch me try,” Julian mumbles into his mug. He doesn’t think she can hear him.

“What did he say to your messages?”

“He said he was down for it,” Julian says quietly.

“Down for what?” She holds his gaze with an intensity that burns in the unreachable centre of his head. It’s too much to maintain when he has to admit that he prepositioned fucking his best friend. “I’m assuming you don’t know what to say to someone in that situation?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to have sex with him?”

“Well yeah, but I don’t know if I can. People talk,” he says. He leaves the other reason, that he’s going to become a professional footballer and male professional footballers _can’t be gay_ , unspoken.

“Can you trust him?”

“He hasn’t broken my trust yet.”

“Then hopefully, you have nothing to worry about,” she concludes with a sip of her drink. He’s grateful for her immaculate social skills more than ever, when she goes on to talk about how shit her English Abitur exam was, and Noah isn’t brought up again.

She bids him goodbye with a kiss on either cheek before she disappears across the square. The afternoon sun is blinding as he decides to head home and maybe lie in his childhood bed for hours, commiserating over his inability to be sane. 

By the time he gets back on the train, he’s almost able to breathe again. His mother took him shopping for his suit, he caught up with Dan and Lukas, and played video games with his brothers until past two in the morning. It’d be perfect if it wasn’t for the minute eye contact he had with Lewis as he was walking Jannis and Jascha to school, and the dread that resonated through him.

He half-expects Noah to be waiting for him when he arrives home in Wolfsburg, but it turns out he doesn’t have to see anyone until he walks into his school for the Abiball.

His eyes fall on Noah immediately.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he’s worried if someone can tell his secret just from looking at him, but it’s actually a message from his agent.

_What are you doing next season? Wolfsburg want to know if you want to be transferred elsewhere._

He looks up, baulks at the fact Noah is suddenly right in front of him and _fuck_ , he looks even better up close. His cheeks burn furiously when Noah greets him with that killer smirk of his.

“Want to go and get drinks?” His _best friend_ says finally. His dark eyes are looking Julian up and down and the noise of the party mutes to almost nothing in their moment. Nodding assent almost breaks it.

The alcohol dissolves whatever barriers the tension has created between them. In between the million photos and conversations with teachers, he always finds himself gravitating back to Noah. He’s pretty sure some of the teachers think the two of them are a couple by the end, when the two of them are intoxicated like hell and Noah’s arm is slung low on Julian’s waist.

They stumble into a quiet room near the end of the ball. Some of the other couples are splayed out on the ornate chairs in the corners of the room, each paying Julian and Noah no attention at all. 

Noah’s hands go to Julian’s cheek.

“Do you still mean what you said?” he breathes as they lean against the wall where the decorative lights don’t quite reach. Noah’s eyes catch the slight spot of illumination. “When you texted me about wanting to fuck me?”

Julian tries not to look at him, but there’s nothing to avert his eyes to. Noah is his space now.

“Julian?”

He tries to eke out a ‘no,’ but his throat can’t form the words. His heart skips several beats as he formulates his plan to escape, and it’s almost activated before the alcohol hits his head.

He wishes he could feel his inhibitions leave his body.

“I did,” he says, “I do.”

“I have an empty house,” Noah continues, words hot against Julian’s neck. His tone is low and alights the alcohol in him.

He might be on fire when Noah’s eyes flicker to his lips.

“Not here,” he croaks out when Noah begins to lean dangerously close, “too many… people.”

“I get that,” his best friend says, “meet me at my house after the ball.”

The alcohol is swirling in Julian’s brain and it’s so vivid he doesn’t even register Noah leaving until his best friend has been out of the room for five minutes. There isn’t much time left, so he staggers out of the room (avoiding eye contact with the students who have definitely found hook-ups for the night) and manages to get himself lost inside a crowd of drunk, dancing people.

His year stumble out of the doors as the chimes of the bell tower ring out. Everyone’s surrounding him, and he’s alone in a crush, and it briefly occurs to him that he _could_ go home, avoiding Noah and the list of regrets that writes itself by the second despite what he said earlier. He starts to step towards the exit closest to his house when he feels a heavy weight jump on his shoulders.

“Where are you going?” Noah says quietly as he lowers himself to the floor.

“Sorry,” Julian replies, trying to slur his words in disguise. “I got lost.”

“It’s this way,” Noah says with a lilt in his voice that sparks a wonder in Julian that he’s misread the whole situation. The wind cuts through the thin material of his shirt and he shivers involuntarily. Noah rubs a hand along his arm. Goosebumps follow his touch.

The final voices of their schoolmates have long since drained from earshot when Noah interlocks his fingers with Julian’s. Every moment they’re out in the dimly lit Wolfsburg streets is an invitation for Julian’s career potential to plummet, and even the strongest alcohol does nothing to douse the bitter sting of lingering concern.

“No one is home,” Noah’s voice is quiet, yet to Julian he could be yelling, “we can do whatever you want.”

He wants to remain silent, hope it deafens Noah and that he can escape, because he feels as if a serpent has coiled itself impossibly tightly around his neck. His silence stretches out into the street in front of them and he thinks Noah is about to say something when a drunk couple come stumbling out of a house and Noah pulls him into an unlit side street.

The couple are too self-absorbed to notice them as they pass. 

Julian barely has chance to catch his breath before Noah grabs his hand and starts sprinting the final few streets back to his house. The glow of the streetlights merge with the houses they’re passing in a way that’s explicitly terrifying Julian has to clamp down tightly on his lip to prevent himself from crying out.

His tongue swipes over blood as he follows Noah into his house, almost tripping over the stairs by the door.

“Careful,” Noah jokes, climbing the stairs towards his room backwards, as if he was scared Julian might evade him. “Julian, why are you so nervous?”

There are so many answers and so many ways that Noah could respond to his answers. He’s drunk as fuck, his house is miles away (he’s not even sure which pocket his key is in), so he whispers the safest option, “I’m a virgin.”

“Don’t worry,” Noah smiles, but there’s something in it that Julian can’t name but it’s detestable, “I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.” His fingers lace in the gap between the buttons of Julian’s dress shirt, entangling Julian in his grasp and yanking him through his bedroom door. The shift in centre of balance sends them both over, Julian landing on top of Noah, and that’s it, that’s when Julian is really fucked.

Noah doesn’t look like himself. The familiar friendly glow of his bronze eyes is gone, replaced by something steely and infinitely less endearing. He’s pretty, Julian can see that just by looking at him, but he isn’t _Noah_ , the guy who made Julian’s heart skip a beat when he hung off the edge of his bed.

He blames it on the infamous contortion of alcohol. 

Noah’s fingers knot in his hair, pulling him in a little bit too forcefully to be enjoyable. His lips slide messily against his best friend’s as he feels teeth nip at him, his hair being tugged with increased pressure and it doesn’t feel soft and romantic, yet it also lacks the spark of incensed desperation Julian imagined every time he stroked his dick.

He finally manages to pull away when he feels the air being stolen from him.

“Please,” he stutters, “just kissing.”

“Just kissing?” Noah says.

“Yeah. I’m not ready,” he says, and all the alcohol in the world couldn’t melt his clarity. His blood racing in his ears drowns out Noah’s response, but by the gentler way his best friend reconnects their lips implies his understanding.

He can’t shake the uneasiness that should not be associated with making out with his crush, and for some inexplicable reason, it isn’t reassured by reminding himself of the trust he has in Noah. It isn’t something to do with his career.

It’s something else he doesn’t know, and the thought is enough to make him break the kiss.

Noah stops him with his lips before he can force the words out. There’s the dizzy sensation of rotation that the alcohol in his brain prevents him from deducing until his back slams against the carpeted floor and his _best friend_ swallows Julian’s yelp of surprise. Noah’s hands are wrapped around his waist, thumb flicking the button low on his shirt, and _fuck they weren’t there before and it’s far too intimate_.

“Stop---,” he says into Noah’s mouth. 

He gets no response. If anything, Noah’s touching increases in aggression, but it isn’t until there’s the stifling sensation of cold air on skin does Julian notice Noah’s popped one of his buttons open. He lets out a whine of terror, scrabbling against the weight of his sedentary best friend who is still pressing down (and Julian’s ninety percent certain he feels a pressure emanating from Noah’s lower region that belies arousal) against him, restricting his hands as he tries to do the button back up.

Noah says something against his skin that he somehow knows he isn’t meant to hear. The spot where his words engraved themselves ices painfully. He’s so enraptured by the horrific sensation, Noah’s undone another three of his buttons by the time his mono-focus is broken.

“No,” he gets out, hoping the older man can hear him from where he’s spoken into the minimal space between them. “Please, no,”

“You’re cute saying my name like that,” Noah says, and Julian tries to answer him, tries to tell him that he wants him to stop, but his mouth is covered by Noah’s as his shirt is torn from him. Noah’s skin is almost alight when he holds Julian’s wrist, forcing Julian to trail down his neck with his fingertips, yet Julian can’t evade the merciless chill that sobers him up almost immediately. He keeps trying to make Noah understand that this isn’t what he wants, attempts to scramble to his feet but his legs are shaking and Noah’s too quick for him, looping his fingers in Julian’s belt holes before he can get out of arms’ length.

Noah must discreetly shut the door at some point because when he turns to grab a bag from his wardrobe, Julian notices his escape plan is foiled by the stickiness of the hinge. Turning back to Noah, a bottle is shoved into his hand with Noah muttering something about drinking again.

Julian had been feeling scarily sober but the moment he ingests the alcohol he’s gone again, way worse than before. Artificial light spills in from the street and mixes unhealthily into a glow Julian can’t break down into its individual parts, and that’s when he feels the trace of his trousers sliding down his inner thigh.

“Help,” he whispers to no one, feeling Noah demolish his trust with every touch of his skin. He can’t discern anything after that.

He wakes the next morning with the sunrise, feeling like he’d been hit by a truck and then had that truck reverse over his body. His body is held in an iron grip and he’s vaguely aware his hand is shaking uncontrollably as he starts to come to terms with where he is.

Coherent thought abandons him momentarily when he turns to see Noah lying fast asleep next to him in an identical state of undress.

Julian can’t look at him because he’s already piecing together the puzzle, the dull ache in his ass and the unanswered whispered cries for help that echo in his mind. The taste of alcohol on his lips, replaced by Noah’s mouth and then his cock as his hair was jerked to coerce him into taking it deeper, the shudder that rippled through him at the feeling of penetration that burned aggressively while he zoned in on a rut in Noah’s headboard.

His eyes sweep across the room and fall on his phone, sticking out from a pile of clothes on the floor.

He crouches down, body flushing at his nakedness as he unlocks the mobile, clicking straight onto the text from his agent he got as he walked into the ball. It’s real, it’s still there, and one glance up at Noah makes his decision for him.

 **Julian:** Place me on the transfer list, please.

He gets dressed in record time, slinging his jacket and tie over his shoulder as he leaves Noah’s bedroom before his assailant wakes. He finds the keys on the side table and lets himself out, barely stopping to post the keys through the letterbox in his haste to get as far away from Noah as possible.

The worst part of all is the betrayal of trust that stretches over his skin, that reeks in the slight smell of sex that clings disgustingly to his body. Noah was his best friend, the one who knew his biggest secrets and he knows he heard him say no and did it anyway. Even his name elicits a stab of agony in his heart. His stomach convulses and suddenly he’s vomiting the copious amounts of alcohol still in his system onto the grass of a little park on the outskirts of Wolfsburg. He wishes he could vomit the pain out as well.

Blinking causes a burn when the tears threaten to overspill, but he just about manages to get back home before his body shudders violently and he breaks down. The way the run of the shower water drowns out his sobs brings him back to the feeling of insignificance that plagued him the previous night.

It’s not like he can report it, not with the career panning itself for him. He should’ve been more fucking grateful and maybe he wouldn’t have deserved it. His agent hasn’t replied, but he blocks Noah’s phone number with a trembling hand and falls back on the wooden floor, sniffing violently.

Shadows circle him as he lies there unmoving, wishing that he was _anywhere but here._

Teardrops stain the cardboard boxes he’s placed his things in as he duct-tapes them up in preparation to move out, not feeling a scrap of emotion for the city that handed him his final years of development. He doesn’t feel like eating.

He wakes the next morning with a message from his agent.

_Leverkusen want you._

He doesn’t ask about the fee, or the contract, or where he is going to live. He trusts his agent implicitly for those details. Maybe, if things had been different, he’d consider the other options that may come before making such a massive life decision, but all he can see when he blinks is Noah’s dark eyes and the way he licked his lips before he fucked Julian.

He texts back an agreement and doesn’t leave his house for the next three days. Noah tries to stop by at least three times, leaving panicked messages at the buzzer tone begging for Julian to come and see him, and even the sound of his voice knives Julian, renders him useless in a catatonic state of fear.

Panic consumes him for even the short walk to the train station and he’s halfway to Leverkusen before his heart stops jittering completely.

The lights of the BayArena glow in the evening light as he steps onto the platform of his new home and prays that his past will never catch up to him.

* * *

_**berlin, germany (2016)** _

Löw is chatting avidly to the under-seventeens coach when Julian arrives in the hall for the talk the head coach wants to deliver to them. He’s running a little late, having been held up by a broken hairdryer, so there aren’t many seats left when he arrives.

“What time do you call this?” He hears someone yell over the general conversations and scans the crowd helplessly for the source of the noise, before his eyes fall on Leon, smirking at him with Max by his side. There’s an empty seat between Max and Lars that Max gestures towards, resulting in Julian being faced with the awkward task of climbing past several under-seventeen players to reach it.

“Thanks,” he says when the lads stand up to let him through. One of them he recognises as Sam Schreck, who he’s seen play in the youth teams at Leverkusen, standing next to a tan boy who doesn’t look a day older than fifteen yet possesses an incredible aura of mature calm in his blankness.

“I hope you’re not going to be wearing your hair like that all the time,” Max says as Julian sits down, already laughing as he takes the shove Julian gives him. “What? I’m just saying the truth.”

“You’re being a cunt, that’s what you are,” he shoots back, “I literally texted Leon to say my hairdryer stopped working.”

“I didn’t see it,” Leon protests lazily while he scrolls through something on his phone. Julian resists the urge to make a cutting comment about being distracted by Max and opts rolls his eyes dramatically, shaking his head at Sam who catches his eye. He’s about to whisper something about Schalkers being idiots when Löw taps his microphone, releasing an awful burst of feedback that causes half the room to viscerally cringe. Julian has only met him a handful of times, but he’s already terrified of the hostile look on his face as he glares at the players gathered in front of him.

“He better not begin his speech with ‘we are gathered here today’ again, or I might actually lose it,” Max murmurs, and Julian has to try very, very hard to keep his snort of amusement silent. Next to him, Lars gives him a warning glare.

Julian knows it’s a massive honour to be included in the Olympic squad for the Games in Rio, but he can’t help but wish Löw had a more inspiring voice when he begins talking about the format of the two competitions. Max and Leon are muttering between themselves and Julian can’t quite make out what they’re saying, but he’s pretty sure it’s something derogatory about his staling tactics.

He wastes time by watching the second-hand tick repetitively around the clock behind Löw’s head.

“Goretzka,” he says eventually, and Julian just about has time to fear his friend is going to get eviscerated before everyone in the room starts clapping and Leon’s getting to his feet. It isn’t until the Schalke midfielder is shaking hands with Löw does Julian twig he’s just been awarded the captaincy for the tournament.

“You’ve got to start being responsible now,” he says to Leon as he reaches them again, “no more bitching about Löw’s tactics for you.” He snickers loudly when his new captain almost falls over trying to multitask getting back into his seat and flipping him off, silently howling at the remark Max makes about Leon needing help while the talk continues just a few metres away. Julian ends up fighting the giggles for so long he misses the announcement of the under-17 captain and there’s only a couple more things said by the coaches before the two teams are left to socialise.

Julian’s laughing with Mattias and Niklas when Lars comes up to him and calls him over to take a photo with the rest of the Leverkusen players. There’s only four of them, he discovers, when he follows his captain over to the plain wall where Sven is waiting to take the photo – himself, Lars, Sam, and the tall boy he saw earlier; who is shooting him the tiniest of smiles as he approaches them.

“Hey Sam,” he says once Sven has taken the photo, “how are you?”

“I’m alright,” the younger one says, turning to his taller friend. “Kai and I wanted to say that we really look up to you. We come to watch you and the rest of the seniors train quite regularly.”

“Thank you,” he stutters, caught off guard by their compliment and the intensity by which Sam’s friend, _Kai_ , is looking at him. He doesn’t know if it’s intentional, but the boy has a way about him that conveys so much mystery within so little expression. Julian can't help but notice the striking hazel flecks in Kai’s green eyes. “Um, nice to meet you.”

“You too,” Kai says quietly, throwing a glance at Sam that Julian cannot determine at all.

“You’re Kai, right?” He says dumbly.

“Yeah. Kai Havertz,” he says, proffering a hand for Julian to shake.

“Julian Brandt,” he begins to say, before remembering that Kai will definitely know who he is. He has no clue why his brain is suddenly going into meltdown while standing in front of two teenagers that have just told him they admire him.

It doesn’t help that his brain starts racking itself for reasons unknown. 

“I think Atakan wants us,” Sam says suddenly, nodding at something over Julian’s shoulder, and then they’re gone, disappeared into the crowd before Julian has time to even wish them good luck for their upcoming tournament. He consoles himself with the knowledge that he will definitely see Kai again when they return to Leverkusen, but there’s a weird unease that lingers with him for the remainder of the afternoon.

The name Havertz is oddly familiar, yet he can’t for the life of him place where he’s encountered it before.

They don’t interact with the under-seventeens for the rest of the time at the training camp, and Julian oversleeps and misses their send-off to Azerbaijan, so he doesn’t get to speak to Kai Havertz again. It doesn’t stop himself from having tunnel vision when he catches glimpses of the youngest squad training, eyes falling on Kai and the effortless way he commands the midfield during practice games.

“It won’t be long until he joins us in the seniors,” Lars says one afternoon when they’re in the gym, catching Julian watching Kai and Sam pass a ball between themselves on the field outside, “it could even be next season.”

“He’s very attack-minded,” Julian replies, “he’ll fit in well with our system.”

“He will. He’s a talented kid.” Lars says over his shoulder as he heads to the treadmills. Julian tears his eyes away from watching the Leverkusen youngsters before Max and Leon can spot him and start making comments. The two of them are on the rowing machines together, Leon trying very hard to maintain a captain’s example while Max is apparently spending the time primarily trying to annoy him.

He’s walking along the clifftops of Zante a couple of weeks after the training camp when he remembers his conversation with Lars and that the group stage for the under-seventeen tournament should be coming to a close. He doesn’t have a long period for relaxation before he’s due back in Berlin; given the federation has decided to fly the team out to Brazil early in order for them to adjust to the climate, so he ambles back to his villa and searches the Germans’ results.

They won their first game and drew their second, so they’re on course for qualification. It actually turns out they’re playing Austria in their final group game later on in the evening, so Julian sets a reminder and starts researching how to tune in.

He almost misses the start of the game as he lies on a deckchair, watching over the little white houses on the hillside. He stays there for the entirety of the game, the soft ripple of the water fountain from the swimming pool on the patio ambient in the background as he watches Germany tear Austria to pieces.

It’s evident from the first couple of minutes that the Austrian midfielders are struggling to contain Kai’s endless creativity. Germany score within the first five minutes, the football almost entirely played in Austria’s half and even when they break, they’re dispossessed and Atakan gets away, scoring a beautiful goal.

The game is nearing the end of the first half when Kai’s shot gets deflected into goal and he jogs away, arms raised in celebration. The camera cuts over to him, all sweat and a wide smile, centred in a hug with the rest of the team.

Zante’s sky is streaked with the pink of dusk when the game ends and the teams head down the tunnel. Some of his friends are heading out, but he can’t afford to be reckless with the Olympics next month, so he stays on the deckchair as the sun sets behind the sea and tries to tune out the buzzing of the insects. He drags himself inside at around eleven at night, falling asleep almost instantly.

He follows the quarter final from the private beach below the cluster of villas in their vicinity, nodding approvingly at the commentary about the youth team’s efficiency. It’s a scrappy game in the end, Germany winning 1-0 and setting up a match against Spain in the semi-finals. He doesn’t think about their progression at all for the final few days of his holiday, spending his time skiing on the water, laughing as the salty spray floats up and soaks his sun-coloured skin.

Germany’s match against Spain coincides with his flight home, but he arrives home to discover the team threw the match away. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth for a couple of days, but its sting fades within a few hours, the upset eased by his excitement for the departure to Rio.

He spends the night before the long train journey to Berlin at Sven’s house. There’s a few of them there, including Lars and Timo, and they end up staying up way later than they should dissecting all of the potential routes to the gold medal. Julian’s still not completely confident in some of their presence, so he keeps his contributions to a minimum, disappearing to the room he’s sharing with Timo at the earliest possible chance.

Leon and Max have saved a seat for him when he boards the express train at an ungodly hour the following morning. Most of the team are still in various states of drowsiness (he’s pretty sure Joshua falls asleep the moment he’s stowed his suitcase on the rack), but the two Schalker players must have had at least three extra shots of caffeine because they’re bouncing off the walls of the vehicle.

“Shut the fuck up,” Julian whines as he rests his head against the window, wincing when Max shines a torch light into his eyes, “as captain, shouldn’t you be setting a better example?”

Leon snaps to attention almost comically, and if it wasn’t for the fact Julian is way too tired to deal with their bullshit he’d fall about laughing alongside Max, who is saying something about him being “impressionable,” and, “needing to follow the captain in terms of etiquette,” accompanied by inelegant snorting. Eventually, Max quietens, and Julian allows the train to rock him into sleep.

He wakes with the bustle of the train pulling into Berlin and the team starting to grab their stuff. Leon has to shake Max awake (the aftereffects of the coffee must have worn off midway through the journey), and they almost leave a half-asleep Klostermann on the platform as they move through the station to their airport connection.

There are a few fans with enough spare time who approach them, but on the whole they are unbothered as they walk through the airport shopping centre. One boy wearing his Leverkusen jersey runs up to him, asking shyly for him to sign the shirt and take a photo with him, which he does. The notification with the photo pops up as he’s settling into his seat on the plane, deciding that he needs a lot more sleep if the dark circles outlining his eyes look half as bad in actuality.

He’s sitting on a row with Leon and Max for the fourteen-hour flight and is half worried that he won’t get any rest with their antics, but Max falls asleep before the plane has even taxied to the runway, bored of Leon’s formal talk with one of the coaching staff. The flight’s a little delayed in a queue of aircraft, but before Julian knows it there’s the rush and the familiar swoop of take-off resonating low in his stomach. Once they’re safely in the air he reclines back in his chair and drifts off to sleep.

He has no idea how far through the flight they are when he wakes with a crick in his neck, the plane dark, most of the team asleep, and Leon and Max gone. Julian sits up, looks over the rows of chairs to see if he can spot them through the dim lights but they’re nowhere to be seen, so he shrugs and tugs his shoes off.

The light of his in-flight television is painfully bright when he opens it to look at how long they’ve got left, before rolling his eyes at the nine hours and getting comfortable again.

A gnawing in his stomach wakes him with four hours left, but it isn’t long before he’s presented with food. Max and Leon have returned and are sleeping almost on top of one another in the tight space, Max’s leg trailing dangerously close to invading Julian’s space.

His seatmates remain asleep until the descent into Brazil when Leon jolts awake, immediately running a hand through his hair as he blinks rapidly.

“Are we nearly there?” He asks Julian once he registers that he’s awake.

“See for yourself,” he says, pushing the curtain up. The plane is below the clouds and immediately his eyes fall on the glittering sea of the Rio beach. Leon leans over Max clumsily, waking up the younger in the process, earning himself a slap with a malice that should be impossible for someone in the deepest throes of sleep five seconds prior.

“I can always sense that prick,” Max grumbles when Julian asks him through his amusement.

“That is no way to speak to your captain!” Leon protests indignantly, before proceeding to hit Max back in a perfect exhibit of his maturity. The two of them end up having a mini-playfight on their seats, causing Julian to lock eyes with Nils and shake his head.

All the blood drains to his feet when the plane pulls up at the Rio de Janeiro airport and walking the few hundred metres to the building seems like an enormous task. He’s lost his friends in the crush to exit the plane, so walks quietly on the edge of the group, squinting in the obtrusive summer sunlight.

His heart convulses when the team enter the arrivals lounge and he spots the throngs of media waiting to broadcast their arrival. Leon and Lars are the first players called away to do a few interviews, but for the most part Julian is largely left alone, the reporters noticing that he is obviously dead on his feet.

If it wasn’t for the vibrancy of the city startling him into alertness, Julian’s pretty sure he would’ve fallen asleep on the short bus journey to the Olympic village. Unlike most of the other national teams, most of Germany’s matches are in the host city’s stadium, so they’re able to base themselves in the village. Joshua is saying something about climbing Sugarloaf Mountain that he agrees to in his drowsy state, praying that the Bayern player isn’t intending to commence his plans that afternoon.

Jetlag strikes him harshly, almost falling asleep at the team dinner (especially during Leon’s speech, which ends up in humiliation when his new captain takes delight in calling him out) and it’s barely seven o’clock before he passes out in his bedroom. He’s sharing a flat with Max, Leon, Serge, Davie and Joshua, who leave him largely alone after Leon chastises Max for trying to draw a dick on Julian’s forehead in marker pen.

He is yet to adjust fully to the time zone and wakes at five, strolling out to the flat’s balcony and watching the sun rise over the bay, marvelling at the delicious dusky streaks of dawn reflecting in the water of the bay.

“It’s beautiful,” Leon says with a small laugh when Julian jumps at his voice. His captain comes to sit next to him, placing two cups of coffee on the little table as he sprays mosquito-repellent into his ankles. 

“Is Max not awake yet?” Julian asks once he’s taken a sip of coffee. 

“Nah. I woke up--- he wasn’t awake when I checked on him.” Leon’s awkward tone washes over Julian like his captain his just poured a bucket of freezing water over him. He opens his mouth to question him, but Leon beats him to it, “it’s weird that we’re finally here. I know the tournament doesn’t start for another two weeks, but still.”

“Do you think you’re ready for it?”

“Honestly?” Leon asks, locking Julian in his gaze, before sighing slightly. It’s unnerving, really, because it’s the first time in all the months he’s known Leon that the older man has ever looked nervous. He was a stupid child (he still is when he’s with Max, Julian thinks drily) and now he’s composed, with the chiselled stone-face that does not belie emotion. He hopes it wasn’t the media’s fault. He suspects it was, so to see that drop is practically alien to him. “I’m terrified I’m going to be an awful captain.”

“They wouldn’t have picked you if they didn’t think you were capable,” Julian says. “The team is formed from your friends anyway.”

“I know,” Leon sighs, “it’s just the pressure to deliver in Brazil again. They expect gold, and I know I’m going to be one of the first ports of blame if we don’t get it.”

“The media always forget that football is a team game,” Julian replies, turning when he hears footsteps in the flat behind them. Max has woken and is stumbling out onto the balcony, collapsing in the one vacant chair on Leon’s other side. Julian allows him to get settled before he finishes, “we won’t let them blame you exclusively.”

“Is he worrying about the captaincy again? Leon, we spoke about this last night, you’re going to be absolutely fine. I’m—We’re all here to support you.”

Julian has to wonder if Leon and Max are excessively prone to parapraxes or if they’re hiding something, but he’s distracted by Leon asking him if he’s ready for the tournament.

“I think so,” he says quickly. He doesn’t want to admit any fears to Leon and Max, because as close as they’ve become recently, ever since Noah he’s been unable to fully allow himself to trust anyone. Not when he’s so prone to catching feelings and subsequently having it blow up in his face. Not that there’s any likelihood of it happening with either Leon or Max, given the two of them fall into easy conversation with casual touching the moment Julian stands up to try and forage for food.

Leon’s fears turn out to be unfounded. It’s evident from ten minutes into the first training session that the midfielder has an implicit understanding with the coach and the team and provides an effective link despite the scorching Brazilian heat. It’s winter, yet the humidity leaves Julian sweating relentlessly.

Most of the Germany team arrive after the footballers have been there for a week, and Max is finally able to lead the team up Sugarloaf Mountain. They run into some of the British gymnasts at the peak, marvelling at the insane tricks one of the men’s team pulls on the barriers of the mountain while yelling something in indecipherable English dialect. Max, Julian and Leon take a photo together, the clouds settling low over the sea to create a beautiful backdrop with the Christ the Redeemer statue peeking in the corner.

The football tournament starts a couple of days before the opening ceremony with their match against Mexico. Leon’s pacing in the dressing room, trying to calm himself before he can begin to address the team, completely oblivious to Max sitting on the bench with obvious concern in his eyes.

When the national anthem booms out around the stadium, the shirt suddenly begins to hang heavy on his shoulders. He feels the eyes of Germany trained on him, even when the Mexicans begin to sing their anthem, and it hinders him for the opening section of the match.

So much so, it feels like a parallel universe when he watches Leon collapse to the floor in under half an hour. He’s pretty sure Max is about to burst a vein in concern when Leon is assisted off the field, gripping his shoulder with tears in his eyes.

Julian just watches him go, unable to make his legs move in any direction. He meets Lars’ eyes, his captain’s pale face, and both of them have played this game far too long to not know that Leon’s shoulder is probably dislocated, and that he definitely won’t be playing any other games for the rest of the Olympics.

The first thing he sees when he arrives in the dressing room at half-time is a pained “LET ME SEE HIM!” coming from a distraught Max who is shoving at the goalkeeping coach, trying to restrain him. He knows the team should be focusing on breaking through the Mexican defence and winning the match, but aside from Max’s audible distress, the team sits in stunned silence, eyes trained on the closed door that Leon is receiving treatment behind. Occasionally, they can hear a strained “fuck,” in a tone that sounds thick with tears, and he’s pretty sure Max verges ever closer to breaking the door down at every word.

The coach tries to distract them with tactics when there’s eight minutes of half time left, talking about how to draw one of the centre-backs in towards Julian, allowing Serge to run in behind. He thinks Max has just about calmed down when the call comes for the second half and the Schalke player begins voicing trepidation about how he’ll never be able to play the rest of the match.

The second half is a mess, the game reflecting the fraught mood of the German players with their concern for their captain. They end up going two down before Serge and Matze score, pulling them up to draw two all. Julian feels almost hazy when he shakes hands with the opposition and ends up half-carrying Max down the tunnel to stop his friend from tripping down the stairs in his haste to get to Leon; who isn’t even in the stadium by the time they make their way through the media firepit anyway.

“We think it’s dislocated,” the doctor says to Max, after Julian begs him for information – given he thinks the midfielder is about to pass out if he doesn’t get an update on his best friend the moment they step into the dressing room. “He’s been driven back to the village.”

It’s a miracle Max doesn’t leave anything behind in his haste to get back. Julian watches him the entire bus journey, texting avidly as his expression only gets darker.

“Leon?” He asks.

“I’m messaging him, but he isn’t replying.” Max answers, and it’s almost terrifying how close he sounds to tears.

The driver has barely stopped the bus before Max is making his way down the central aisle, desperation starkly out of place from the solemn mood settled over the rest of the team. He doesn’t stop to collect his suitcase, resulting in Julian and Joshua struggling up the stairs (the lifts gave Julian shudders on the first day) with three bags between the two of them, Niklas and Serge muttering between themselves as they follow along behind. 

It’s eerily silent when the four of them enter the communal area of their flat. Leon’s bedroom door is shut tight, and it doesn’t take much more than a hushed whisper from Joshua that they should grab clothes to change into and head over to hang out with some of their teammates.

Lars and Sven are attempting to lighten the mood with comedic stories about the other, but the tone is downplayed with a universal concern about Leon’s condition. Max’s bedroom door is still wide open (exactly how they left it) when they return back late at night, and if it wasn’t for the indecipherable hum of whispering that travels through the door, Julian would be convinced Max and Leon had eloped somewhere.

Max is already awake, sitting on the balcony when Julian gets up, staring out over Rio. Julian tries to speak to him, but all he gets is a noncommittal shrug and gives up.

He can’t help but feel awful for his friend when it’s announced that Leon is being send home and the captaincy is being passed to Max. Judging from the look on the Schalke midfielder’s eyes, it’s glaringly obvious he was aware of the former, but then a nausea-inducing expression of unfiltered guilt crosses over his face and Julian knows Max was neither expecting, nor wanting, Leon’s designated role to be shoved over to him.

Max’s face has drained of colour and he’s shaking slightly when they make their way back to their room after training. He doesn’t speak to anyone, just flies into Leon’s room without knocking and it isn’t long until Max’s raised voice comes travelling through the thin, closed door.

“I DIDN’T WANT THIS!” Max yells, “THEY DID IT DELIBERATELY! IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE YOU, WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?”

Leon must say something quietly that must serve to incense Max further, because suddenly his flatmate is yelling about how he can’t manage it without Leon, how he couldn’t bare to stand on the podium without him, and it’s actually traumatic to listen to. Julian knows he should leave, but there’s something in Max’s tone, some hurt being unearthed that roots him to the spot out of pure feeling.

Then, everything goes quiet. Max stops yelling, and there isn’t even the buzz of quiet talking that echoed around the flat the previous night. There’s nothing but silence.

If any of the others guess what Julian’s suspects has happened when Max resurfaces, hair tangled and face blotchy with sweat, none of them say anything. Leon’s due to fly back to Germany the next day, and there’s no doubt that Max and Leon are confirming suspicions that have been piqued since their first day in Rio with their unquiet silence.

The rest of the tournament passes by in a blur of mumbled promises to do Leon proud. Julian doesn’t score a single goal, not even when they dismantle Fiji entirely, so part of him expects to be benched for the final game against Brazil. It doesn’t happen, and he’s there, arm in arm with Lukas and Sven as the anthem rings out, bouncing against the sea of green and yellow.

It’s the biggest game of his life so far.

His memory of the tournament has been irrevocably tainted with the vision of Leon falling to the ground in anguish, Max’s words of hurt when he found out he was made captain, Julian’s own poor performance seems scarcely important in comparison. It’s particularly ridiculous that, when Neymar hits a perfect free kick that sends the arena into raptures, Julian feels the most relaxed he’s been since the wheels of the plane touched the airport tarmac.

The moment starts to wash over him as Germany fight to get back into the game. Just as they’re working up a charge, the referee blows the whistle for half time.

For all his panic, Max is a damn good captain. He’s not even trying to conceal that he’s trying to embody Leon’s faultless composure, maybe to help him feel like his best friend (lover, Julian has no fucking idea) is with him. It’s a bit of an elephant in the dressing room. Even so, Julian has to blink hard to stop himself from tearing up when Max nets the equaliser. The slice of the ball against the netting sounds like a message to Leon, something so personal Julian isn’t even sure he should be looking.

He knows, really, that Brazil deserve the gold medal. It’s their home Olympics. The nation had turned out to watch them lay the demons of the World Cup semi-final to rest. 

He doesn’t let himself consider it when he steps up and scores his penalty in the shootout.

It rings around his mind as a careless taunt that drags him to his knees when Neymar scores to seal the score line. Max falls into his eyeline, staring blankly into some invisible point of the stadium and mumbling something Julian wouldn’t want to comprehend even if he could (he has the horrible feeling that it’s an apology for Leon), and it might be the most heart-breaking thing he’s ever seen.

Silver around his neck weighs like the shirt on his chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Max hold up Leon’s shirt and he wishes he could take in the scene and its meaning – but then Brazil step up onto the top step of the pedestal and he has to drag his eyes away.

He flies from Brazil to Spain the next day, but he’s restless. He tries to relax against the sensuous heat of the Spanish afternoon, until he finally realises a couple of days into his holiday: he misses football. He misses his team. The revelation does little to rid him of the feeling.

He’s ridiculously early to training on his first day back. The Bundesliga season has already kicked off (Leon recovered from his shoulder injury pretty quickly), so he has a lot to catch up on when it comes to slotting into the team’s new tactical setup. There are two cars in the car park when he pulls into the training complex. One he recognises as his coach, but the other is unfamiliar and he finds himself walking cautiously down the corridors before entering the first team dressing room for the first time in a few months.

His first thought is that someone has spread their stuff over to his space, and that he will definitely not stand for that. His second thought is that he thinks he recognises the tall, tan figure that is bending over his kit bag, rifling through the contents for something.

His third thought is _fuck_ , because he definitely recognises the tall, tan figure. Kai Havertz has turned around and now has him locked in that green-honey gaze of his, and he’s _smiling_.

“Hey,” Kai says.

* * *

_**leverkusen, germany (2017)** _

“Fucking Bayern,” Julian grumbles as he steps past Kai into his best friend’s flat. The teenager who has slowly developed into his best friend over the course of the past year looks entirely unfazed by Julian’s pissed off demeanour, nodding silently while Julian launches into tirade. He can’t help it. Not only was there the opening-day loss, but the train was delayed by three hours and Kai wasn’t even in the travelling squad. “How the fuck did we end up playing them in Munich on the first matchday of the season?”

“Someone has to,” Kai says bluntly, letting the door shut behind him and heading into his living area. The younger one knows better than to question Julian when he’s in this sort of mood, so there’s comfortable quiet when Kai throws on a video game, chucking Julian a controller.

They’re half a game in when Julian feels his phone vibrate in his pocket, which he duly forgets about within five seconds when Kai says something idiotic that draws a laugh out of him despite his mood. The uncomfortable, sticky feeling of late summer evenings settles over the apartment, the kind of overripe sensuality that can’t be truly evaded, but it isn’t out of the ordinary for Julian to strip himself of his shirt and chuck it on Kai’s floor.

Kai ends up shouting obsessively at the television and they have to stop playing to allow Julian to catch his breath from laughing too hard. His best friend doesn’t end up putting the game back on, instead opting to slouch back on his sofa as the sun sets outside, resting his head on his arm as he looks at Julian.

“How was Bremen?” He asks, casually, because how could he know the fear that strikes Julian whenever he goes home? Most of his year group have dispersed for university, but now he’s a big deal he feels like he’s got to be a magnet for his past.

“Good. I don’t think I’ll go back until we go for the game at the end of the season.”

“You’re not going back for Christmas?”

“Nah,” Julian says, “parents are away but Jannis and Jascha are coming up to celebrate with me.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Honestly?” Julian says, “not that much. Do you miss Aachen?”

“Yeah, of course I do.” Kai answers like it’s obvious, “why don’t you miss Bremen?”

Julian’s tempted to tell Kai everything about his final year at home and why that’s made his life so hard now, but when he looks at Kai again all he can see is Noah and the promise to never betray his trust. He knows he’s being irrational, and unfair, that there’s no way Kai could ever prove himself as trustworthy when Julian won’t even open up, but by the time he’s pondered it through Kai’s already continued.

“Aside from the game against Werder last year, I’ve only been to Bremen once.”

“When was that?”

“I was like nine,” Kai says, “we were driving to Denmark. My brother went off with this very talented blonde kid who’s name I never knew because I wasn’t listening when he introduced himself, and his friends, and then the blonde kid’s younger brother turned up and I ended up playing with him.”

Something resonates in Julian’s throat, because suddenly he remembers a very particular game of football after school when he was twelve years old. He knows Kai has a brother called Jan. He remembers Jannis, barely even five-foot-tall, doing penalties against Kai’s dad and suddenly, despite the fact he and Kai have been close for a year now, he remembers precisely where he knows the name Havertz from. It’s the wide-eyed kid adolescent him wanted to compliment on his outrageous talent. The kid who was rumoured to be going to Leverkusen’s youth academy.

The kid he said it was no guarantee he’d ever make it.

“That was you?” He blurts out like there’s any chance it isn’t.

“Don’t fucking tell me,” Kai laughs, leaning back against the arm of the chair, “don’t tell me _you_ were the blonde kid who invited my brother to play with your school friends. He didn’t shut up about your talent for about two years after that day.”

“You are aware you played against Jannis?” Kai’s met Julian’s brother on several occasions and they get on like a house on fire (sometimes Julian thinks the two of them do it deliberately as part of a ploy to piss him off).

Kai laughs louder, almost snorting in disbelief, “this is so embarrassing. I spent half the afternoon staring at you.”

“This is so weird,” Julian says, and really, he’s an idiot for not realising it sooner. “I spent the whole time thinking the same about you. I remember wanting to tell you how talented you were, and to wish you luck with getting into Leverkusen’s academy. Not that you needed it,” he finishes, gesturing at the framed shirts hanging on Kai’s living room wall.

“I can’t believe Jannis didn’t say anything!”

“He’d kill me if I told you this, but I’m pretty sure you were his first crush,” Julian jokes, “we went home, and he talked about you all evening.”

“I’m flattered,” Kai says, placing a hand on his heart in mock-fawning, and it’s only then does Julian realise how Kai makes everything seem a lot easier, how his best friend can move on from being downtrodden so easily and drags Julian along with him.

“Jannis is going to lose his shit when I tell him,” Julian says absent-mindedly, pulling his phone out to check the time. It’s very late, and even though it’s barely a five-minute walk to his house, the sky is black. There’s a message from his agent that he probably should’ve replied to an hour ago. “I should go before it gets later.”

“Yeah,” Kai says, getting to his feet and showing Julian towards the door. “Half three for training tomorrow?”

“See you then, bro.” Julian says and closes the door behind him, clutching his bag in one hand. The blistery heat of summer has receded completely into the night, and he finds himself tugging his jacket closer around him as he paces his way home.

He doesn’t read the text from his agent until he’s settled in bed, and it’s probably for the best because he isn’t expecting its contents in the slightest. Julian knows the speculation about his sexuality will inevitably flare if he doesn’t get a girlfriend at some point in the future, but he wasn’t expecting advances so soon. He’d come out to his agent under an oath of secrecy, and it plays tenfold on his mind with every new person who uncovers his dark secret, but his agent has actually suggested a model he knows personally.

The only problem is he doesn’t know if she knows it’s fake.

He has a million questions and yet he does nothing to find answers to them. Not until three weeks later, when the season is in full flow and he finds himself heading to a secluded coffee shop in the outskirts of Cologne to meet her.

If it wasn’t for her almost-frightening resemblance to Lotta, he’d relax instantly the second she smiles at him. She introduces herself as Emily and compliments him sweetly on his football achievements.

She’s so lovely he feels terrible for thinking he has to mess her around just to hide himself. It’s distracting, the guilt that washes over him, he almost misses her explain everything,

“Your agent told me you were looking for something to help you conceal your sexuality,” she says in a quiet tone, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s about to save his life, he’d be making calls to his agent, demanding to know about why he’s spread his sexuality so openly. “I guess it’s not so much of a big deal for me, but I sort of am too, I guess.”

“Thank fuck,” he breathes without thinking, before making eye contact with her and both of them are unable to prevent themselves from falling into loud giggles. The coffeeshop is almost deserted, and Julian can see the barista shooting them confused glances from the counter. When they’re finally done laughing, he drags his voice down and whispers, “so, you need to hide too?”

“Like I said, not to the extent of you,” she shudders, “I’ve seen some of the comments about the idea of a gay male footballer and it makes me feel physically sick. But in terms of career prospects I think being perceived as straight is the best thing for me.”

“The worst thing about it is lying to everyone,” Julian agrees, “and I was so worried that I was going to have to lie to you.”

“One fewer person to worry about,” Emily smiles gently at him, and even for someone who struggles to see the best in people, sees a glimmer in her that reminds him that not everyone is who he fears the most. Not people with as much to lose as he has.

“How long do we keep this up for?”

“Long enough to make it believable,” she says, “but hopefully Brian will dictate it for us.”

“Even so, I’d like to get to know you on a friend level,” he says to her, “no one has to know that we don’t fuck every time we’re out of public view.”

She chokes on her coffee, swatting at him with her free hand. With the clarity given for the means of the relationship, Julian finds himself settling into his sofa-chair and listening to her talk about some particularly eccentric photographer she had a recent photoshoot. He had training in the morning and spent most of it laughing at Kai attempting to multitask about seven things at once, so he doesn’t believe there are any restrictions on the length of time he can spend with her – which is why he’s particularly surprised when his phone starts ringing with an incoming call from Kai.

“Hey,” he says, slightly annoyed that he’s been cut off from chatting to Emily.

“Hey Jule,” Kai says, voice sounding a little thick, “are you free right now?”

“I’m,” Julian begins, not quite sure if he should admit everything to Kai yet, “I’m with someone at the moment. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Kai says quickly, in the least convincing voice Julian’s ever heard. He tries to dissuade himself from concern, convince himself that it’s just the crackle in the phoneline distorting Kai’s voice, but then his best friend lets out a definitely unplanned sniff that Julian could never mistake. 

“Do you need me?”

“No!” Kai protests, “I’ll be fine.”

The line goes dead before Julian can say anything else.

“Is everything okay?” Emily says quietly, not showing a trace of annoyance about being interrupted. “You look quite panicked.”

“I don’t think so,” Julian sighs, placing his phone back on the table and half-hoping it’ll spring to life with another call from his best friend. “My friend asked if I was free, and he sounded like something was bothering him.”

“Do you want to go and visit him?”

“He hung up on me,” Julian admits, and she nods, breaking his gaze awkwardly. If this were a date; Kai would’ve just torn it into pieces. “I should probably leave him be.”

Kai’s choked off tone infiltrates the back of his mind when he and Emily finally leave the coffeeshop and walk into the backstreets. It’s no problem to lace her fingers with his as they trail towards the city centre, oblivious yet attracting the attention of any media personnel that may happen to be loitering in depths of Cologne. She’s got an aura that makes it so easy to act like they’re together in actuality, makes it so easy for him to look down at her and smile and pray that someone gets a photo of them.

If their goodbye kiss is sexless, no one has to know.

Julian wakes the next morning to a positive message from his agent and his and Emily’s faces splashed over the cover of BILD.

• • • • • • 

“Hey,” Emily says from the living room where she’s chatting with Jannis when Julian comes down the stairs. “How are you?”

“Cold,” Julian jokes. It’s the middle of December, a thin frosting of snow settling over his garden as more floats down from the dark sky. It’s only five in the afternoon and yet the street outside is almost completely deserted, ten days to Christmas and one game left before the winter break. He had training this afternoon, the outdoor session abandoned when the coach couldn’t see them through the blanket of white descending on the field. Even so, he stayed late at the complex, throwing snowballs at Kai until their faces were flushed and hot despite the chill. Kai had offered to go back to his flat and continue pissing about in the snow, but then Emily had texted asking to come over and Julian had to decline, trying to ignore the way Kai’s face fell. “How was the shoot today?”

“It went pretty well,” she smiles, “I ended up being dunked in the snow in my outfit though.”

“Lovely,” Julian laughs, “I bet the designer was thrilled.”

“He only berated us for fifteen minutes. Really, we got off lightly.”

“Should’ve pelted him with snowballs,” Julian suggests, laughing aloud at the mental image of Emily, wearing heels and a tight dress, throwing snowballs at a man in a suit who’s attempting to yell at her. His ‘girlfriend’ mumbles a good-natured acknowledgement, before asking Jannis to leave so she can talk to Julian.

“What’s up?” He asks once they’re alone.

“I think we’ve done enough. Pranking the media for the past few months has been great fun, but no one’s going to question our sexuality now, and--,” she trails off, cheeks reddening slowly.

“And?” Julian questions with a teasing lilt in his voice, laughing harder when Emily’s cheeks darken considerably.

“Nothing,” she says, throwing a cushion at him, “forget about it.”

“How can I forget about it when you’re breaking up with me?!” Julian exclaims, pretending to cry into the cushion. “How could you do this to me, Emily?”

“Quite the actor you are.”

“You say, like we haven’t been faking a relationship since September. I have more sex with you in those stories written by fangirls than I do in actual life!”

“Honestly, we should’ve had sex. It would’ve been hilarious.” He knows she’s joking, but he can’t help but feel his blood run scarily cold when he thinks of the last and only time he’s had sex, when he was drunk and the world was spinning around him while he tried to get Noah to stop. The worst part is, he sees so much of what physically attracted him to Noah in Kai, and the thought scares him every single time he sees Kai run a hand through his sweat-sticky hair.

He wouldn’t mind fucking Kai, if he’s honest. He just doesn’t know if the aftermath would create a parallel, because that really would kill him this time.

“Julian?” Emily says. “Are you alive?”

“Barely.”

“Wow, I can’t believe breaking up with you has really destroyed you,” Emily says sarcastically, placing a hand on his forehead like she’s checking his temperature, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this anymore.”

It’s the humour he’s never quite gotten used to, even despite all the time he’s spent with her.

“We’re staying friends though?” He says, like she’s about to leave him forever.

“Of course, idiot. Maybe there’ll even be speculation that we’re back together.”

“That would be funny, if there’s someone else on the scene like you said,” Julian winks, dodging the gentle slap she directs at his cheek.

“I never said that!”

“It was very obvious,” he shoots back. “Now come on, tell me!”

“Honestly, it’s no one. I’ve been speaking to her for two days, Jule.”

“You already like her though!” He teases, like he’s thirteen again and laughing with Dan about Lukas’ crush on Tatjana. 

“She’s very nice,” Emily concedes, “but I don’t even know if she’s gay, and besides, if she works it out that I’m with you, that’ll end the chances of anything happening.”

“But you’re not with me anymore, so you have nothing to worry about. What’s her name?”

“That’s the thing,” Emily says, “I don’t know.”

“How does that work? Have you seen a photo of her?”

“She sent me one, and it was so weird because I was expecting her to be pretty, but not as beautiful as she actually was, and then there’s the fact she could be catfishing me.”

“If it turns out that she is, you come straight to me. I’ll set the boys on her,”

“The boys? What, you and Kai?” Emily laughs.

“You forget we’re athletes,” Julian shoots back.

“Kai would be useful,” Emily says with a smirk, teasing twinkle in her eye, “but you’re too soft to do anything.”

He shoves her shoulder, causing her to bounce against the cushions of the sofa and fling back at him, easily ending up on top of him, gulping for air and laughing. At the sound of their laughter, the door clicks open and Jannis comes into Julian’s eyesight, followed by a frowning Kai.

Kai’s face is strangely gaunt and pale, and Julian finds himself gently pushing Emily off him and making room for his best friend on the sofa. He knows the younger one still isn’t completely comfortable with Emily’s presence, that he admitted during the one half-argument the two of them have ever had, but his gaze transfixes on the floor in the way Julian knows is his precursor for emotion.

“Is he okay?” Emily whispers. Julian has no way of knowing if Kai can hear them when he responds. “Should I go?”

“Yeah,” Julian says, “I’ll show you out.”

“You don’t have to,” she says, already on her feet. “I’m sorry it had to end this way.”

“Me too. It’s just for the best.”

“Exactly,” Emily nods, hand resting on the door handle, “I’ll see you around.”

“Bye, Em.”

Jannis follows her out and Julian can hear them laugh in the front hall before the front door closes. There’s a few moments of awkward silence while Julian tries to comprehend thought between worrying about the potentially awkward timing of Jannis’ return and the unfiltered confusion emanating from Kai, who’s torn his vision from the floor and is now staring at Julian with knitted eyebrows and lines inscribed on his forehead.

Once he’s sure his brother won’t return, he speaks,

“Em and I broke up.”

“I thought so,” Kai says, “but why was she on top of you when I walked in?”

Julian should be prepared for this question, but somehow all thought catches in his throat. He’s well aware that Kai will be expecting heartbreak, and has been presented with childish giggling and playfighting, to add to whatever the fuck’s been going on with him recently.

It’s not the first time Kai has turned up without warning and sits on his sofa, looking like he’s on the verge of tears and somehow, always ends up leaving without Julian having any clue what’s prompting it.

“It was--- amicable,” he says awkwardly, delayed, and he knows Kai doesn’t believe a word he’s saying.

“Jule, stop fucking messing with me,” he says eventually, in a voice Julian has never heard aimed at him before. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not in the mood for your jokes.”

“I have noticed,” Julian says softly, trying to make Kai look at him from where his eyes have drifted from the elder’s face in anger, “but Emily and I really have broken up. It just, well, it hasn’t been romantic in a while, but neither of us could be bothered to deal with the press speculation.”

“Looked romantic to me.” Kai says simply.

“It wasn’t.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Kai grumbles, already getting up and looking like he’s about to walk out on Julian and no, Julian won’t have that, not when he arrived with _that_ look on his face and hasn’t smiled at all. “I won’t bother you with my stupidity when you have bigger things to deal with.”

“Kai, please, calm down,” Julian says, guiding the younger back to the sofa, “I’m sorry for not being clear with you, but can you please tell me what’s been on your mind recently? What is it that you feel like you can’t tell me? I don’t care about the fact I’ve just broken up with my girlfriend if something’s bothering you.”

“How did you know there was something?”

“I know you well enough by now.”

Kai scoffs, shaking his head like Julian’s said something absolutely ridiculous, and for the first time there’s a weird feeling of being out of the loop when it comes to what’s going on inside Kai’s head. He’s normally so intoned, and the discontinuity is jarring.

“Lately I’ve been feeling really weird,” Kai begins, and it takes Julian a second to remember that Kai is probably going to admit something huge. His best friend is already notorious for being unfazed, but something’s cracking in his expression as he grips the armrest. “I thought I was getting ill or something,” he says with a bitter laugh, “and I guess in a way I am.”

“What?” Julian blurts out without thinking. He’s so embarrassed at the incredulous look Kai gives him that he misses the first part of the younger’s sentence.

“--- and I know they’d hate me forever if they knew that I find some guys attractive.”

Julian feels like he’s transcended into another dimension, when his life is a series of organised chaos and confession. First it was Emily and wanting to call off their fake relationship because she’s found a woman that she’s into, and now Kai, who is telling Julian that he likes men as well as girls and hates how he has to hide himself.

He’s been unable to stop himself from feeling Noah’s presence in Kai, but when he meets his best friend’s eyes and his watery smile, he’s finally able to dispel the inability to trust people for the slightest second.

“It’s terrifying,”

“No shit.”

“I’m not saying it to be patronising,” Julian says evenly. He knows Kai is just scared, as opposed to angry, but he knows his words are only confusing the younger one. “I’m saying it because it’s what I’ve been dealing with since I was about sixteen.”

Ignoring the look of relief that floods Kai’s face is extremely difficult.

“I’ve been so scared,” Kai admits, “I thought you were going to be like them.”

“Like who?” Julian says, filled with a sense of rage, “who’s hurt you?”

“All the people who comment about how they’d stop supporting players who aren’t straight. Some of _our_ fans.”

“They’re not our fans,” Julian reassures him, “and if they did stop supporting us, who the fuck cares? We still have each other.”

* * *

_**leverkusen, germany (2018)** _

Words fail him when Kai pulls him into a hug before he’s even in the door, lacing his fingers into his hair as Julian buries his face in the crook of his best friend’s neck. The stark difference of the individuality of the players in Russia, helpless as everything fell apart around them, to the painfully compassionate care Kai is giving him is enough to bring the faintest traces of tears to his eyes.

He’s missed Kai more than he realised. Especially since he isn’t saying anything, knows there isn’t anything to ease the hurt of being branded a national embarrassment, one hand places delicately on the small of Julian’s back as he finally allows himself to fall to something like pieces.

“Let’s go inside,” he feels, rather than hears, Kai mumble into his skin.

The door clicking shut feels far too loud when he’s so sensitive to everything, but there’s Kai placing his arm around him after he shuts the curtains of his affluent backstreet flat. 

Being so open with his emotions is petrifying and part of him is convinced his knees are about to give out on him, but Kai’s still holding him together and providing him with the ability to act like he’s okay. He’s guided onto the sofa, eyes falling on the black, unmoving screen of the television on the opposite wall as he tries to block out the thoughts emitted from the unreachable centre of his head.

He’s not sure how much Kai can read, but the thought of him knowing should not be as scary as it is. He’ fucked up at the World Cup, and how is that surprising when he’s as fucked up as he is? When he’s haunted by the ghost of someone he used to know, who has mercifully remained in silence (whether it be for guilt or another reason, he doesn’t know, but the reminder causes an icy shiver to flash down his spine).

Kai risks his name.

It’s so fucking idiotic for him to be this fragile.

“It’s not,” Kai says almost inaudibly. Julian didn’t even realise he’d said that aloud. “You’re not fragile for showing emotion.”

His response gets caught by his own fear. He’s not making sense, how he subconsciously dragged himself to Kai’s flat almost as soon as he arrived back in Leverkusen, suitcase still chucked on the backseat of his car, yet opening up to his best friend still feels like voluntarily throwing himself off a cliff into a dark abyss.

Kai tries to call him back, but he slips off into dissociation. He doesn’t want to talk. He just wants to sit on Kai’s sofa and stare at the television while the younger man _holds him_. It’s what wakes him, when Kai moves away, and he feels cold air spread in the space where his best friend once was.

“Don’t move away,” he croaks. “This is what I need right now.”

“Are you sure?” Kai says but moves back anyway. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not yet. Not for a couple of days.”

He sees Kai move uncomfortably under him and for the first time, looks up at the other man. He’s not looking at him, eyes trained pointedly on the photo of the two of them he’s hung on the wall, and it’s at that exact moment Julian realises Kai’s eyes are bloodshot, and pain is flickering across them.

“What are you thinking?”

“That I’m terrified about what you’re thinking.”

“You’re the only bright spot,” Julian says quietly, “I promise.”

Kai smiles softly at that.

The room is dark, so Julian has no idea what time it is when he suggests watching a film. Once Kai has put it on, some romance that he’s pretty sure he’s chosen to get the emotion out of Julian, he sits on the other side of the sofa, completely detached from Julian, and if he wasn’t heartbroken it’d be humiliation how much Julian craves the feeling of Kai’s warm arms around him.

“Hey,” Julian says, allowing himself to admire the way the light of the film casts shadows over Kai’s face, and it’s not the first time he notices how beautiful his best friend is, “come here.”

If his stomach flips slightly when Kai smiles genuinely and crawls noisily across the cushions to reach him, it’s easy to ignore.

The film’s cinematography is gorgeous, even more so when Julian watches it reflected on Kai’s face. Something’s different about him, the softer, more carefree way he’s styled his curls sends a strike of something through Julian’s heart, something he doesn’t want to think about, but the feeling makes him feel sick and dizzy in an exciting way.

“Why?” He whispers, when the film cuts to a close-up of the devastated female character staring forlornly at the cobblestones after her lover has just left her for London. 

“Hmm?” Kai says.

“Why would he leave if he’s in love with her?”

“I don’t know,” Kai sighs, “I guess love is always presented to us as unproblematic or some shit. When I’ve had crushes, I’ve wanted to spend every single second with them.”

“I’m the same,” Julian says, “he’s an idiot for leaving.”

Kai muffles an agreement into the pillow he’s clutching with the arm that isn’t looped around Julian’s shoulders. They talk quietly over the film, making amusing comments at the embellished argument scene taking place on London’s South Bank before the heat of the on-screen kissing shuts them up.

The feeling of Kai’s finger running along the vein on Julian’s inner arm is suddenly the only thing Julian can focus on. He suspects his best friend knows exactly what he’s playing at, because even with his eyes focused purposefully on the pictures displayed on the screen, it would be impossible for Julian to miss the tiny, knowing smirk gracing the corner of Kai’s lips.

He’s got so used to getting unintended flashbacks to Noah whenever Kai clings onto him (which happens a lot, he’s pretty sure that Kai was a fucking koala or something in a previous life), or does something minute that causes him to morph momentarily into Julian’s ex-best friend, that when nothing happens and his thoughts bear no trace of incoherency, he’s struck by the wonderment of not knowing what the fuck is about to happen.

“Can I ask you a weird question?” Kai says into the silence, still not looking at him. He grunts assent, but he isn’t expecting what the younger one says next. “If you were in a fake relationship with Emily, does that mean you never had sex with her?”

“How long have you been wondering that?” Julian bursts out laughing to cover the humiliation of the blush tinging his cheeks. Kai’s stuttering an apology and that just makes him laugh harder, because Kai is an idiot but also that, scarily, he _really doesn’t mind_ that Kai is basically questioning him about his sex life. “I don’t mind, you idiot. To answer your question: no, I didn’t have sex with her.”

“Not even casually?”

“We considered it, but I don’t think I could’ve got hard.”

“Bro, she was so hot,”

“Maybe I just like dick too much,” Julian retorts, unintentionally treading too close to his secret. He knows Kai can tell something’s up, because he doesn’t laugh at the younger choking on his water at his words, and he knows what’s coming.

“You’re not a virgin, are you?”

Truth be told, Julian has not had sex since the night of his Abiball. He’s tried, with drunk men whose interests definitely do not include football, but every time it comes around, he freaks out and is left giving a shitty blowjob while chastising himself for cockblocking a stranger. He remembers the way his throat cut out and he went lightheaded from the lack of oxygen, the hazy merge of the lamp and the husk from the streetlights outside, tainted in his drunk vision, and it has scared him away from sex for years.

He expects to see Noah’s dark skin looking back at him when he steels himself enough to make eye contact with Kai. What he’s met with is a soft smile and something indecipherable that the walls in Kai’s eyes can’t quite keep from leaking through, alongside the faintest flush of something like arousal painted on his cheeks and yeah, Julian thinks he’s finally ready to place a little bit of trust in someone again.

“No, I’m not,” he answers finally, “are you?”

He can’t believe it’s only been a few hours since he collapsed into Kai’s arms, distraught over the humiliation of Russia, and now he’s sitting here, watching Kai’s eyelashes flutter while he shakes his head.

His fingers find their way onto Kai’s shirt, tangling themselves in the material. It’s enough to make Kai look at him, slight aroused glint in his eyes given the consent that _this is okay_ , yet smiling and nodding feels like an incredible effort in the cage of Kai’s gaze. Julian’s not known what he’s wanted in a long time, yet right there, with Kai working him backwards against the sofa as his fingers grip into his shirt, he’s never been so certain.

He’s working up the courage to slip a hand underneath the barrier of Kai’s clothes when his best friend pulls back suddenly. There’s just enough time to feel guilt rear its ugly head and settle bitterly into his stomach before Kai mumbles something about protection and a promise to be as quick as possible.

Julian takes the moment to recompose himself and calm the slight fizzing in his blood, willing his dick to soften so he can play it cool and maybe even flirt with Kai a little bit. Of course, that all turns to shit when Kai comes back with stuff that he chucks on the coffee table and climbs back on top of Julian, and within seconds Julian can feel the familiar whirl of his dick starting to get hard.

“You’re sure?” Kai says into the tiny space between them.

“Yeah,” Julian says, slipping a hand over the small of Kai’s back to tease him. He knows Kai doesn’t mean to let out the tiny gasp when Julian rubs up the trace of his spine to distract him while he shifts them into a more comfortable position, but he loves it anyway.

He runs the back of his thumb along the seam of Kai’s shirt, relishing in the way the younger looks between his touch and his face like he can hardly comprehend what’s happening. If this was different, if Julian actually had feelings for Kai and this wasn’t just sex because they’re both horny and find the other attractive, maybe he’d lean up and kiss the beautiful, bewildered look straight off Kai’s face. Maybe Kai would push his head against the armrest as they make out, thrust down like there’s no one in the world but them and what’s happening between them, but that’s not possible. It can’t be possible, but he doesn’t care because he’s more than happy to appreciate what Kai _is_ giving him, the disbelieving looks and short, cut off, choked moans that go straight to Julian’s dick. The rest of the stuff doesn’t matter, he tells himself, as he slides Kai’s shirt up and over his head.

Kai’s head drops to rest against his shoulder when he spiders his fingers down the length of his best friend’s torso, pressing gently against the definition of Kai’s muscles like he’s trying to force his nerves in his hands to remember that this isn’t Noah’s soft belly, this is someone else, someone who’s already checked he’s okay with this.

He wants to say something, anything, but then Kai shifts his hips and their hips line up and Julian can feel Kai’s cock, hard through his shorts, and all coherent thought dissipates and there’s nothing to him but Kai. His shirt comes off sometime shortly after that, messing his hair up into disarray that Kai joyfully locks his fingers into. Kai is agonisingly attractive, letting out tiny gasps as Julian feels along the length of the tan skin of his side.

He allows himself to touch him, runs a thumb over Kai’s hard nipple and revel in the slightly breathless spike in Kai’s moan. His best friend traces circles on his pale skin, gently fumbling with Julian’s belly button before his hand finds the invisibly blonde hair on Julian’s navel.

He feels Kai’s lips move against his collar bone, and for a terrible moment he worries he’s leaving kisses there, before something registers that Kai is _speaking_ to him and holy fuck, if that’s not the hottest thing he’s ever felt. Kai says something then that he isn’t completely sure he’s able to deduce, but he’s pretty sure it might be his name.

“What did you say?” He gets out, definitely rushed and probably inaudible.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kai says, flushing red, and it’s another one of those unnerving moments where Julian’s disappointed that he can’t kiss him. He can’t. They haven’t spoken about that. He doesn’t get chance to say anything, because Kai is back down in the crook of his neck, thrusting down erratically as Julian tries to ignore the growing want in the pit of his stomach.

Time is another concept entirely. The film has long since ended and is now mutely playing its scene selection snippets as Kai rolls his hips suddenly, and that’s when Julian lets out a moan.

“Shut up,” he gasps out once he’s caught his breath, because the fucker is laughing at him.

“Did you come?” Kai says in between his laughs, and there’s a dreadful moment where Julian is convinced that he _has_ because he can feel a damp patch on the inside of his underwear, but it’s just pre-come and it’s a massive relief because really, Kai would mock him forever if he’d come untouched. 

“No,” he says, “you’re going to have to try harder than that.”

He can see Kai’s eyes darken and he is anything but ready for the low thrum of excitement that settles over him. Any inhibitions he still has die instantly.

“Are we going to stay here? We can, or we can go to my bedroom---,” there’s something in Kai’s voice when he trails off that makes Julian wonder if Kai is just a little bit gone as well, and really it should be frightening. Summer rain patters gently against the window, storm clouds creating a darker hue inside the living room where they peek through the closed curtains. He’s pretty sure it’s a beautiful setting, but he can’t take his eyes off Kai and the way his best friend’s gaze is glazy and his eyes are slowly taking in all of Julian’s face.

“I don’t mind,” he answers honestly, “whatever you’d rather.”

“I think we should go there,” Kai says quietly, “but I don’t know if my legs are going to hold up for the walk.”

Julian doesn’t say anything, just slips out of Kai’s grasp (he misses the grounding feeling of Kai’s fingers sliding across his lower back, it’s awful because he thinks he might float away without it and god knows he might find his inhibitions again) and lifts his best friend onto his shoulders. Kai lets out a noise of protest before leaning down to grab the things he brought from the bathroom. His body is warm in Julian’s arms. He can’t stop himself from sliding a hand high up on the back of Kai’s legs, enjoying the little choked-off sound the younger one lets out.

Something shifts when Julian places Kai on the bed. It’s even darker in his best friend’s bedroom than the living room, but Kai’s eyes are glistening and yeah, if this was different Julian would lean down and place a kiss on his best friend’s forehead.

The slight breeze in the room shuts the door.

He briefly thinks that nothing is more confusing that whether or not this is supposed to be hot and passionate or slow and caring, whether or not they’re doing this together or if he’s supposed to take the lead.

“I can hear you overthinking from here,” Kai whispers into the darkness, fingers scrabbling to find Julian’s hand on the mattress. He tries not to think about how _right_ Kai’s hand feels entwined with his own. “Stop it.”

He’s pretty sure Kai’s movement temporarily rids him of the ability to speak. He trails the fingertips of his free hand along Kai’s collarbone again, trying to focus on that and not on the _other thing_ , their hands that Kai has laid to rest on his own stomach like it’s obvious. It might be louder than anything Kai could say now that Julian has the younger one beneath him and holding his hand like he’d rather do anything else than try and escape.

“What do I do now?” He says without thinking. Kai looks at him like he’s stupid from where he’d thrown his head back against the pillows, confusion obvious and that’s not what he wants.

His brain could be melted into a puddle, and he’d be completely unsurprised.

“I could think of several things,” Kai says, and it could be hot, Julian could read it like it’s teasing, and they could be done with this awkward standoff with half-hard cocks and _far too much staring_. He’s just about to throw caution to the wind and break their handhold to run a hand down towards Kai, but his best friend is now struggling to sit up against his body weight and he’s shifted from their contact. “But first I need to work out what the fuck’s going on with you right now.”

“What?” He gasps.

“Julian,” Kai says suddenly, and that snaps him back because Kai barely ever uses his full name (except when Julian tackles him in training), “what happened?”

“It’s nothing,” he lies.

“You’re really going to pull that shit with me when we’re doing this?” Kai says and something in his tone belies pain and that’s enough to make Julian come clean.

“I’ve only had sex once,” he begins, and immediately it’s evident that Kai knows there is something else. “It was the night of Abiball, with my best friend at the time--.”

Kai’s room melts away and his vision can almost reinstate the daze of intoxication as he falls against a body (Kai’s, Noah’s, he doesn’t know anymore). The pile of Kai’s laundry in the corner turns into their discarded tuxedos. He can almost hear the sounds of the night outside and the choppy gasps of his friend drowning out his protests.

He doesn’t know how long he stays in his own history before Kai calls him back with a touch to the back of his hand.

“The night of your Abiball?” Kai prompts gently.

“I’d had a crush on him, and he knew about it,” Julian breathes out, “I kept saying no, and he kept hearing his name and he got me drunk enough to lose control of myself.”

He can see the exact moment Kai’s mind catches up with his words and it’s gut-wrenching. He’s pretty sure he’s just witnessed the precise moment that something might have shattered in his best friend’s heart (and he doesn’t know what to think if that’s the case).

“Fuck,” Kai says quietly, probably more to himself than to Julian. “I’m so sorry. I just--- I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I wish there was something I could do,” Kai stammers, half looking like he’s about to faint and half like he’s about to break down sobbing. Julian doesn’t know which one is worse.

“No, Kai, please,” he says, unable to hate himself for the desperate tone creeping into his voice, “it doesn’t matter. I’m getting better at trusting people again,” _lies_ , “you just need to stay for me.”

“I can do that,” Kai mumbles, connecting their hands again. They’re silent for a couple of minutes before Kai speaks again,

“Do you want to stop? I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage of everything, what with the World Cup emotions and now this---,”

“Kai. You don’t have to stop.”

“Are you sure?” Most of the time, Kai looks older than he is, but there’s something in his nervous gaze and the slight tremble of his voice that makes him look his age.

“I would tell you if I wanted you to stop,” he says, “I promise.”

“Okay,” Kai swallows, lying tentatively back down against the mattress as Julian climbs back on top of him. He can feel the fear in his best friend’s body, fear that he edges out by slinging a leg in between his and finally lining them up as the clock on Kai’s bedside table ticks on into the night.

He remembers the feeling of Kai rolling his hips back when they were still on the sofa, so he does it slowly, sensually, in retaliation and looks up at his best friend with a smirk when he feels Kai get hard again against his thigh.

Within minutes he’s painfully hard and can already feel a glean of sweat forming on Kai’s back when his best friend finally takes mercy on him, slipping his hand underneath the waistband of Julian’s shorts. Julian’s glad he’s lying down because he’s pretty sure his knees would’ve collapsed in on themselves if he’d been standing the second Kai runs a hand over his cock through the material of his underwear.

“You’re a cunt,” he gets out when he catches Kai’s eyesight.

“I wasn’t saying anything,” Kai retorts with a joking humour far removed from where they were ten minutes ago and really, Julian should be tracking whatever the fuck is happening far better than he is, but how can he when Kai is so close to giving him what he hasn’t had in years?

He thrusts down as payback and watches Kai’s eyes roll into the back of his head with a moan.

“You deserved that,” he says with a smirk, definitely enjoying the way Kai looks at him like he can’t speak. He _almost_ feels bad, so he thumbs at Kai’s navel before running a hand over his crotch, settling on his inner thigh.

“Are you doing this deliberately?” Kai gasps out, looking like he might die and it’s worrying how Julian can’t stop himself from thinking that it’s the sexiest thing he’s seen in his entire life.

“What?”

“Just fucking touch me,” Kai gets out and Julian’s just spidering his touch closer when Kai whines a “ _please_ ,” that has Julian almost ripping at the button of his shorts to get them off.

It takes a moment for his brain to catch up with the change in pace, and in that second Kai’s fumbling at his clothes in retaliation, sliding his shorts and underwear down in one movement before they’re finally unclothed, and Julian has to take a moment to just take him in because Kai is even more gorgeous than he expected.

(It’s thoughts like that, that will ruin his life.)

He strokes Kai’s dick once, twice, before pulling off and watching his best friend go through about seven emotions in two seconds.

“I swear to god---,”

“I just wanted to know what you wanted.”

“Whatever you’re willing to give me.”

“Whatever?” Julian raises his eyebrow, eyeing the lube Kai threw on the bedside sometime since they fell into the bedroom.

“If you want,” Kai smirks, leaning up to run his thumb over the slit of Julian’s dick and he can’t stop himself from breathing out a “fuck” because he isn’t ready for the sensation that ripples through him. It feels like Kai has just thrown him off a building or some shit.

(It’s the feeling him that condemns him forever).

“Have you ever done this before?”

“Once.” Julian wants to ask who, and how, but then Kai’s hand curls around his cock, stroking gently like he’s an expert on what Julian needs, and he’d be damned if he could even remember his name. He’s about to croak out a warning that if Kai doesn’t stop soon, they won’t get to what they just referenced when Kai lets go of his dick, and suddenly it’s all too soon.

Hindsight changes perspective, he thinks drily when he scrabbles on the wood of the bedside table for the lube and condoms. Kai’s got this little soft smile plastered on his face that makes his heart skip a little as they hold eye contact, but he doesn’t want to consider for a moment what that might mean, because things like that aren’t part of the silent contract holding whatever this shit is together.

“Ready?” He asks, not sure if he’s asking himself or Kai, but then Kai nods and he has to do it, he’s in no man’s land now and Kai’s right there with him. If he needed it, it’s his saving grace, that Kai’s right there with him.

He leans down to give the tip of Kai’s dick a kiss. It tastes slightly salty with pre-come.

He thanks god for Kai’s breathy moans, because the pop of the lid of the lube bottle would feel very loud in the almost-silence if it wasn’t for them. It’s cold against his fingers and he knows that tomorrow morning, when the dust has settled on _this_ , he will wonder why Kai has this, who he’s been with, all the unanswered questions that disappear into thin air when he sees the soft curl of a particular strand of Kai’s hair, wet with sweat, sticking to his forehead.

Kai’s intake of breath is sharp, hostile, and Julian almost pulls his finger straight out because he wants nothing less than to hurt him.

“I’m okay,” Kai groans, and that becomes Julian’s guidance, the small words of reassurance Kai gets out while Julian prepares him. He tries not to think about what he’s doing when he scissors his fingers, praying he’s done it enough when Kai is hot and begging for him from where his head has lolled to the side.

He rips the condom open and rolls it on before pushing gently into Kai, forcing himself to count backwards from ten to stop himself from coming immediately because _holy fuck_ the whine that Kai lets out is incomprehensibly hot.

He angles himself and pulls out of Kai before snapping his hips forwards and thrusting in slowly, trying to get used to the feeling that he’s pretty sure he’ll never be able to describe. Kai’s eyes are clamped shut and he knows his best friend is pretending he is someone else and it’s easier to allow Kai to think he is too, because there’s really no one else so he might as well enjoy the feeling of Kai around him.

Kai’s moans are muffled by the pillow he’s clutching.

Julian starts to speed up his thrusts, determined to carry this out as long as possible even when he can feel the vague threat of orgasm already building in the pit of his stomach. He has no idea what time it is, has no comprehension of anything that isn’t Kai as his hands find the younger one’s torso again, tracing the outline of Kai’s abs as he bites down hard on his bottom lip.

There’s the faint taste of sweat in his blood when he licks over the cut.

He can’t stop himself from slumping over Kai’s body as he continues to fuck him, trying to keep himself from spewing out the thoughts that are poisoning his mind, the realisation that there’s no one he’d rather fuck than his best friend and the want to moan his name loud enough for Kai’s entire block to hear. He knows that if he meets Kai’s eyes now, he’d probably do something he’d regret.

Sensation washes over him when he feels the head of his cock brush over Kai’s prostate, and the moan that Kai lets out (even through the pillow Kai’s biting to keep himself quiet, Julian thinks he can make out the syllables of his name) is like delicious backing music to the best feeling of his life. There’s nothing else to it, he tells himself, as he starts to aim his thrusts at the same spot and it’s not long before Kai’s choking out something that sounds like a cry for help.

He barely has time to figure out how Kai likes to be stroked before his best friend comes with a guttural groan, collapsing down against the disarrayed sheets while Julian continues to fuck him, gasping relentlessly before his balls tighten and he orgasms.

He whites out for a second and by the time he’s conscious again, Kai is sitting up and playing with his hair and yeah, Julian likes that _a lot_. He can’t help but wish he could come to this all the time, he thinks, as he slides out of Kai and ties up the condom, trying not to think about it and completely failing.

“Okay?” Kai smiles, looking far too relaxed for a guy that was in the depths of orgasm not a minute ago. He’s ridiculously attractive. That damn curl is still sticking to his forehead.

“Yeah,” he breathes out, climbing off his best friend and burying his face in the white sheets.

“I’m going to have to wash them tomorrow,” Kai jokes, throwing himself down next to Julian and waving off the apology it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to get out. “It wasn’t you who came on them.”

He doesn’t know how to respond, so he stays silent as he watches the clock on Kai’s wall tick slowly around the next minute. It’s very late. He doesn’t consider Kai as he watches the movement of the second hand, evenly, before his best friend has been quiet for over five minutes and he finally rolls over.

Kai is looking at him with something Julian can’t work out glistening in his green eyes.

“That happened,” the younger one says eventually. He looks like he has to speak, or he might die, yet he doesn’t know how Julian’s going to answer him, and Julian despises it.

“Yeah. It did. I liked it.”

He’s grateful that Kai doesn’t attempt to hide the pink swathes of relief that flood the post-coital glow of his still sex-flushed cheeks.

“I did too. I wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

“Me neither,” Julian says, before yawning suddenly. “Mind if I stay?”

Kai looks like a deer caught in headlights and Julian wants to ask why, but then he’s yawning again, and his eyelids are drooping as he slides down into the sheets.

Kai’s still sitting up in bed when Julian drifts off into dreamless sleep.

He’s already out of bed when he wakes again.

• • • • • • 

Julian never sees the stricken expression that crossed Kai’s face when he climbed into bed that first time on his friend’s face again. If whatever emotion that sparked his miniature freak out still plagues him, he thinks, when he’s got Kai pressed against the wall of the showers after evening training, he’s scarily good at hiding his feelings.

While the rest of their world focused on Russia (Julian didn’t watch a single match until the final, and even that was only because Kai and Jannis turned up with beer and honestly, he spent half the match staring at his best friend) he and Kai ended up falling into a casual pattern of going to training, going back to either Kai’s flat or Julian’s house and sleeping together. If any of their teammates notice that they’ve suddenly started coming to the training ground in the same car, none of them care enough to say anything. They’re probably best placed of anyone in the world to know that the thing that Julian overhears Lars refer to as ‘co-dependence’ is nothing unusual for them.

“We shouldn’t do this here,” Kai says over the sound of water cascading. “Lars is probably still around somewhere.”

“That doesn’t mean we _have_ to stop,” Julian winks, running a finger through Kai’s wet hair, tugging slightly on the tangled curls, smirking when he feels Kai’s dick harden against his hip. “I’m sure Lars has seen worse.”

“I don’t think he has,” Kai answers, slipping out from Julian’s grip, not caring about the fact his dick is half-hard. “He still thinks of me as his son.”

Julian laughs at him, in spite of himself. As much as he wants to fuck Kai in the showers and then have to watch his best friend leave the complex like nothing’s wrong, he knows the captain will be loitering around somewhere and would probably sprint back into the locker room at the first noise, and really, he cannot be fucked to deal with receiving a fine whilst trying to bribe Lars and Sven into keeping their secret.

(They would, but Julian dreads to think what the twins would get out of them first.)

“Plus,” Kai says, rubbing a towel through his hair and Julian feels himself go slightly weak when the younger one turns to him with mussed hair and a faux-innocent smirk, “we play Bayern in two days. I wouldn’t want an uncomfortable journey.”

“I wonder what the speculation would be if you were limping?”

“I’d get the club to issue a statement making some bullshit up.” Kai says dismissively before wrapping himself in his damp towel and going to go and get changed. Julian watches him go until the door has long since shut, before he catches sight of his red skin and conceals his body in about three towels before joining Kai in the changing area. The teasing lilt in his best friend’s voice is audible when he says, “where did you go?”

“I didn’t go anywhere?”

“No, maybe not,” Kai raises an eyebrow when he walks over to Julian. His best friend is shirtless and his hair is still dripping, and Julian watches a stray droplet of water run the whole way down Kai’s body before dampening the waistline of his shorts, and he’s never been more grateful for the loose towel slung over his hips. “But you’re covered now.”

“I wasn’t going to walk around naked,” he says, dodging Kai’s hand that’s trying to slide around the top of his towel.

“That’s a shame,” Kai says, voice low and husky and part of Julian wants to drive home in his current state and completely disregard what Kai told him five minutes ago, “I wouldn’t have complained if you did.”

“Fuck off,” he says, heading over to his section of the locker room and drying himself quickly. Kai is still staring at himself in the mirror by the time Julian’s finished dressing, running a hand through his hair as he tries to style the mat of curls while whispering something inaudible to himself. “You’re so vain, did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Yeah, you. Multiple times,” Kai sighs, flipping him off as he grabs his bag. Most of the team left almost half an hour ago, and he thinks he can hear the faint sound of the cleaners beginning to hoover along the corridor. “We should go.”

It’s the weirdest part of this whole friends-with-benefits thing they’ve got going on. The casual flirtatious comments that Kai says like its nothing that make Julian choke on his own breath. The times he glances at his best friend only to find his best friend look away, or the few times he holds his gaze and a small smile appears on Kai’s face while Julian’s stomach does somersaults.

He’s probably still just getting used to it. He’s had crushes before, and they didn’t feel like this. He doesn’t think about Kai constantly, like he’s an obsession, like he did with Lotta. They come back from nights out where Julian has been viciously drunk, drunker than he was the night he messaged Noah, and the only thing they ever discuss is the stupid things Julian does, never whatever he says that he spends countless mornings straining to try and recall. It’s just so easy to fuck Kai at night and then go back to their carefree friendship the following morning. And it’s not like they cuddle, or show much affection beyond those smiles that Julian doesn’t even understand, and it’s not like they’ve ever even _thought_ about kissing.

Which is why Julian feels like he’s been flipped upside down when he’s lying in bed with Kai the night following the Bayern game, stripped down to their underwear and Kai is leaning down and pressing his lips against Julian’s.

He’s sober, and unless Kai has broken some sort of pivotal rule of the team, he’s certain the younger one is as well.

Kai keeps kissing him, placing a gentle hand around the curve of Julian’s neck to kiss him deeper as something in Julian shakes into life and terrifies the living fuck out of him. Kai’s lips are even softer than the way he’s touching Julian and it _hurts_ , isn’t meant to hurt like this, because pain means feelings that Julian has promised to never trust himself enough to have again.

Kai’s lips look kiss-bitten when they pull apart and there’s the faintest blush on his best friend’s cheeks, and _fuck_ , Julian has to kiss him again, has to taste Kai’s moans when he trails a hand down to stroke his cock and if there’s anything he’s learnt from the little gasps Kai’s letting out as their lips slide together is that Kai is a fucking incredible kisser.

There’s no time for contemplation, no time to think about how they haven’t even discussed this and if it’s okay that Julian likes it as much as he does, not when Kai starts to beg into Julian’s mouth and he hopes to god the walls of the hotel room are thick.

He knows the team would support them if they found out, but they’d still been careful not to be too explicit (Kai told him this morning that he’s banned from even being in the shower block while Kai’s there), but then Kai whispered “you owe me for the other day,” while they were shaking hands with the Bayern players (he’s pretty sure Leon overheard, judging by the knowing smirk on his friend’s face) and has pretty much been making bedroom eyes in his direction ever since.

They’d sat next to each other on the bus as normal, talking casually about something mundane while trying to ignore the growing sexual tension that flamed slightly whenever Julian met Kai’s eyes. He’d hoped his friend hadn’t noticed the way his hands had shook as he steered along the outskirt streets, unable to rid himself of the arousal Kai practically eyefucking him had elicited. He’d leant across and given the inside of Kai’s thigh a squeeze once the bus pulled up on the gravel driveway of the hotel, trying to calm himself down while Kai swore venomously at him, trying not to stare right up until he heard Kai curse bluntly and glanced to the door to see Jannis waving at them from the lobby.

Kai’s arousal isn’t surprising, but he’s still fucking making out with him, and that’s starting to become a problem for the defence that’s iced its way around the perimeter of Julian’s heart. It wasn’t like Kai had attacked him, smothered him in kisses until he relented, he’d looked at Julian shyly and stroked hair out of his eyes like he wasn’t certain he was making the right decision.

Julian doesn’t know either.

The desperate catch to Kai’s voice when he gasps Julian’s name is enough to do it for him.

He wants Kai to ask to stay like he always does, wants to hold his best friend in his arms and sleep without the worries that torture him most nights, but Kai’s gaze is foreign, eyes dark as he escapes from the haze of orgasm and climbs out of bed.

“I should go,” he croaks, still breathless, and Julian wants to protest, wants to tell him that he really wants him to stay, tonight more than ever, tell him everything that he _wants_. Kai’s smile is weak when the door falls shut noiselessly.

By the time Julian has remembered how to walk again from the way Kai blew his mind, the living area of the Munich hotel room is deserted. He knows he should follow the younger one, bang on the door until Kai’s minimal patience wears thin and he can question him on whatever the fuck just changed (things are always changing between them and Julian can never keep up) but he collapses into his too-small sofa and stares at the darkening light of late summer against the ceiling of the room.

Kai sits next to him at breakfast with a warning glare to not mention anything. 

It’s a week before they end up back where they’ve been hundreds of times, naked and sweaty in Kai’s flat, flushing out their commiseration of the third straight defeat with sex. There’s something in Kai’s body language, the same thing that taunted Julian relentlessly while they were in Munich and Kai was kissing him like he was drunk out of his mind, so Julian spends the entire evening with his heart stuck in his throat, imagining the feeling of Kai’s lips pressed flush against his own.

It doesn’t happen.

He’s tried talking to Kai about it, only to be left with an offhand “leave it, Jule,” and Kai turning away to speak to Sam and Mitch. He’s never done that. The glare he gives the older one when Julian reaches out to touch his hand is so detacted from the Kai Julian normally sees that he’s rendered the subject an unbreakable boundary, even when he knows they should’ve spoken about whatever happened by this time.

Really, they should’ve spoken about a lot of things and resolutely _never do._

Leon picks up on it within about ten minutes of Julian arriving at national team training, Kai trailing along behind. They’re mingling in the lobby, everyone (apart from Kai, who is listening avidly) ignoring the attempted addressing of the team by the coaching staff; when the former Schalke player bounds up to him with a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Hey, Jule.” He says, and Julian doesn’t hide his eyeroll because Leon is borderline insane sometimes and he just knows that whatever he’s going to say next is only going to serve to piss Julian off. Kai is on the other side of the room. “You can live without your boyfriend for five minutes.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend, you dick,” he mutters back, forcing a smile for Thomas who is making his way around the group, talking the traditional shit about the French and the Dutch.

“Really?” Leon says, slightly too loud. “You seemed kind of close with Havertz after the game the other weekend, and it's not like I haven’t noticed the glances you’re giving him…”

If Leon’s loud voice wasn’t enough to attract the attention of everyone in the vicinity, the sharp wince in response to Julian’s elbow definitely is. Leon makes an underhand comment about Julian getting defensive, but then Kai saunters over and Leon at least has the decency to shut the fuck up.

He knows Leon will head over to his room almost the moment they’re changed after the gym session, so he doesn’t even bother having a shower. Leon’s voice travels along the corridor from the other end of the hotel, yelling something idiotic at Serge and laughing, like always, louder than anyone else around him. Julian had warned Kai that he’d be occupied for an hour after practice, not-so-subtly shoving his teammate in the general direction of Jonas before vanishing upstairs.

Julian remembers Leon’s words from the first morning in the Olympic village.

It hasn’t been easy for him, and Julian feels a rush of guilt when he recollects the hellish things Leon has had to suffer. He was there a couple of games after Leon’s imminent transfer to Bayern was announced, heard the hollers of “snake,” and “traitor,” rain down from the fans bedecked in royal blue, and saw the way Max avoided his gaze from his relegated position on the bench.

Max is in London now. He doesn’t know if he should ask what happened.

The knock on the door comes much later than it should, given Leon’s been within earshot for ages now, but even so, it’s still only the residue of Julian’s guilt that pulls the door open.

“Hey,” Leon says, lopsided smile plastered on his face almost a little too brightly. “Can I come in?” His friend falls backwards onto Julian’s bed without invitation, looking up at him with a challenging expression before he falls about laughing.

If it wasn’t for his doubts, Julian would love to know how his friend manages to be the nicest asshole around.

“Before you say anything, I’m not dating him.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” Leon says, obviously lying. “But thanks for placing that suspicion in my head.” Just when Julian opens his mouth to protest, Leon dismisses him with a wave of the hand. “Chill, bro. I’m joking. If you say you’re not with him, you’re not with him.”

“Thank you,” he says, trying to drop the subject. It’s futile, and he should know it, because once Leon gets caught up in a conspiracy the man never shuts up.

“But do you like him? I mean, there was definitely something there when the two of you arrived---,”

“Like him?” Julian laughs, “Leon, we’re not twelve.”

“Love him. Have feelings for him. Want to fuck him. Whatever,” Leon rolls his eyes, “you’re so annoying.”

“You’re splayed out across my bed right now. I don’t think you have room to talk.”

Leon flips him off and closes his eyes.

An awkward silence settles over the room, expanding until it’s threatening to burst through the glass windows and outside into the hotel gardens. He knows he hasn’t denied Leon’s accusation, and that it’s only a matter of time before the few working braincells in his friend’s head rub together and figure that out, but he relishes the quiet. For one, it allows him to look at Leon and try and work out if he’s dying over Max.

Leon’s phone must buzz, because suddenly there’s a cacophonous noise of the device slamming against the wall.

“Why does he still do this?” Leon mumbles under his breath, and suddenly Julian doesn’t know if he’s meant to be listening or not. “He left too. I didn’t leave him behind.”

“Max?”

“No. It’s about him though.”

It takes Leon a while to look back at him after that, but when he does, his eyes are almost bloodshot and the clench of Julian’s stomach is painful. He’d had a suspicion that Leon and Max had broken up over the transfer saga, had heard the whispers spread from the Schalke players that Leon and Max stayed behind and argued almost every night after practice.

“We broke up.”

“I guessed.” There’s suddenly an unmoving lump fully-formed in his throat that makes speaking very difficult, even if he knew what to say to Leon, who has gone from teasing to wallowing in heartbreak in a very short amount of time.

“You knew how much I loved him,” Leon says weakly. “You saw us at the Olympics.”

“Max was distraught for days after you left.”

“I know. I had to call him every day to check he wasn’t doing something stupid.”

“I don’t get how he could forget about that?” Leon sighs, and there’s a worrying tremor in his voice that Julian fears is the warning to tears. “I kept telling him that the move was for me, and that I loved him, and then he left straight after I did when he promised me he’d stay!”

“Leon,” Julian says, fighting through the lump to get his words out. “You left first.”

“I know I did, but I never thought he’d go as well!”

“He was out of contract, was barely getting any game time, and the one person he loved more than anyone had gone to the biggest club in the country. Why would he stay when you weren’t there?”

“So, you’re saying it’s my fault?”

“I’m not saying that at all!” Julian says, incredibly aware of the fact that his voice is raising and the other members of the team are probably standing outside with their heads pressed against the door. He wonders how much noise it’ll take before Manu heads to reception to get a key and storms in to pull them apart. “I’m just saying that, even though he loved you, loves you, I don’t know, he has to think of himself. It’s exactly the same situation you’re in.”

“You’re right,” Leon mumbles, shoulders slumping downwards. “I feel like such an idiot.”

“What have you said to him?”

“Lots of stuff I regret. I’ve been so insensitive to what he’s going through.”

“When was the last time you spoke to him?”

Leon’s silence is deafening.

“You need to text him.”

“I can’t. He’s blocked me on everything.”

“Book a plane ticket and go and visit him.”

“I don’t know where he lives. All I know is that it’s in an affluent area of London.”

Julian’s about to offer to find it out and give the information to Leon when they’re interrupted by a sharp knock on the door. If this was Leverkusen, he’d ignore it, but Manu is notorious for patrolling the hallways and heaven forbid he not answer the door.

Kai and Serge are standing at the door.

“Come on!” Serge half-yells, grabbing Leon and Julian’s wrists and yanking them out of the room, “come and play us at table football!”

He doesn’t get chance to speak to Leon for the rest of the break (he’s pretty sure the Bayern player actively avoids him in situations that might result in them ending up alone) but part of that is down to the fact Kai is practically clinging to him the whole time. They’re restricted to their separate rooms at night, so they’re never alone.

When Julian scores against Peru, he finds himself subconsciously looking towards the bench, and that’s when he first thinks that there might be something wrong. He’s able to banish it from his mind during the game after a few mistimed tackles, but then Kai comes on for his debut and Julian’s heartbeat starts jumping in his chest. What’s worse is that Kai jogs straight over to him, looking so different in the crest of their country as he passes by, whispering “holy fuck,” and suddenly Julian isn’t sure how he’s going to make it through the final five minutes.

He thinks he’s going to cry when Kai takes his first touch.

Walking over to his best friend (who is fucking glowing and well, Julian doesn’t know what to do with that) is so difficult. He’s pretty sure his congratulations comes out mumbled, but he’s finally able to put a name on why he was so confused after the night in Munich, and _fuck_ if that doesn’t choke his throat with its enormity.

He pretends to be asleep for most of the train journey home, but he should know by now that rest won’t stop Kai from being annoying as fuck (he must have taken lessons from Leon and Max). It doesn’t help that when he does open his eyes and huff at the younger one, Kai just smiles dumbly and rests his head on Julian’s shoulder.

He can see the want in Kai’s eyes when they near Leverkusen, and he almost throws caution to his own heart and follows him home, but then Kai laughs at something he says and his stomach lurches unpleasantly.

“I gotta go home,” he says once they’re on the platform, trying to tune out the disappointment on Kai’s face, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, you too.”

It isn’t a crush, he thinks, as he watches Kai make his way out of the station. The younger one probably put a curse on him when they kissed or some shit, but it’s only now that he really realises. He’s basically been falling in love with his best friend ever since that moment.

* * *

_**barcelona, spain (2019)** _

They’re descending into Barcelona when Julian’s heart starts thumping wildly again. Kai’s got his headphones in, practically almost asleep already despite the sun glimmering in through the plane window as the Catalan city becomes visible beneath them. He’s still wearing his damn training top, despite the fact the club season ended a week and a half ago, and it’s only now that Julian allows himself to stare at the Bayer crest emblazoned across the front.

He knows Kai would’ve killed him if they’d missed the flight because of Julian’s meeting with his agent overrunning, but it hardly matters as he’s ninety percent sure he’s a dead man when the news breaks anyway. Julian hadn’t bargained for the confirmation of the personal terms to take so long, but apparently Dortmund weren’t in a rush so the four of them ended up in a sprint across the Cologne airport terminal to reach the gate for their flight, Sam muttering curse words at Julian under his breath that Julian pretended not to hear.

Leverkusen provided him with an escape when everything around him was falling apart, and he knows that leaving them is going to kill a piece of him, if his feelings don’t kill him first.

In some strange way, fucking Kai has become easier since that day in the train station. It’s easier for him to stare at the younger one with a glaze in his eyes and allow him to think he’s imagining someone else. It’s easier for him because he doesn’t have to talk about anything.

He doesn’t have time to think about it anymore, because the seatbelt sign pings loudly and Kai’s eyes flutter open.

“Are we almost there?” He yawns, fixing Julian with a bleary glance that he knows all too well from the hundreds of nights they’ve spent together.

“Just landing.”

He half-expects Kai to be drowsy for the rest of the day, but something must alert his crush when the sun hits his skin, because he’s bounding around and kicking a football with Mitch and Sam as Julian films them walking across the sun-warmed stones of the port.

Concentrating on the miscellaneous chatter of the passers-by, the odd pieces of conversation he can make out, just about makes it bearable when Kai bounds up next to him (looking insanely good for how basic his clothing is) and starts talking about their last-day Champions League qualification and his hopes for the tournament and Julian has to bite down sharply on his tongue when Kai says that he wants to take a photo of just the two of them with the trophy.

“What about us?” Mitch says, jumping onto Kai’s shoulders indignantly. “You’re just going to ignore the other half of the squad?”

“Obviously,” Kai grumbles, “why would I want your ugly face in my photo with the cup?”

“But you’d have Jule’s?” Mitch shoots back, “I’m insulted!”

“Jule will score the winning goal,” Kai says, turning to Julian with the biggest fucking grin on his face and trying to match it is excruciating. Kai tangles their hands together despite the surroundings, and Julian wonders if his secret is written in the lines of his palm or some shit because Kai’s gaze snaps down to their intertwined hands with a confused expression. “I will want my photo with the hero.”

He flips off Mitch when the ball, intended for Kai, hits him squarely in the back of the head, and some random Spanish teenagers howl with laughter at him.

Mercifully, Kai shuts up once they enter a seafood restaurant overlooking the ocean, instead turning his attentions to flirting with the very pretty Spanish waitress that’s attending their table.

“Bro, what would Sophia say?” Sam whispers once they’ve had their orders collected.

“I told you, I’m not with her!” Kai says back, meeting Julian’s eyes across the table and it takes all his willpower to place his glass down on the table in a measured manner. He first met Sophia in December, when he saw Kai smiling at a pretty girl in the stands, before pulling Julian out of the dressing room post-match to go and see her.

If she’s ever said anything, it hasn’t made Kai awkward with him, despite the fact she caught him staring at Kai as he chatted avidly with her parents and shot Julian a knowing look. That was almost four months ago now.

He’s eyeing the group as he discreetly checks the latest text from his agent, relieved to see Kai throwing a lame slap at Sam’s cheek as he laughs, loud enough for the tanned girl at the next table to look over and Julian notices the exact moment she decides Kai’s hot. He can’t stop the bitter thought of Kai being his, but then he looks back at the phone screen, the date for his medical and the early return flight from the holiday before he feels Mitch’s eyes on him.

“Everything okay?” Mitch says loudly. Kai and Sam shut up immediately.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he stammers, “it’s just that—Jannis has made plans for my mother’s birthday and that means I’m going to have to fly home early.”

“Okay,” Kai says, before the waitress returns with their food and his best friend gives her his most charming smile. His early leave isn’t mentioned again.

The silk curtains billow into the room from the sea breeze when Kai and Sam bicker over which game to play on the console. Julian’s on the balcony, watching the waves ripple over the reflection of the moon, ignoring Mitch’s idiotic comments as he thinks about how he will never have this again.

Kai comes out to call them in. It seems he’s won the argument, because Julian sees the Fortnite loading screen pulsating on the TV when Kai chucks him a controller.

Midway through their first game, something comes over Julian when he gets a glimpse of Kai’s insane concentration. His best friend is taking aim to snipe someone from over eighty metres and he’s biting his lip absent-mindedly, and god Julian wants to kiss him again. He doesn’t care about Mitch and Sam, they’ve been together for months and Julian’s told them about their friends-with-benefits thing, yet Julian’s still stuck at staring at Kai from afar and trying not to moan his name when he fucks him.

A layer of sweat covers his body and causes his t-shirt to stick to his skin. His thoughts are a pressure cooker, and the four of them are trapped by the heat.

Kai doesn’t give him a second glance when Julian takes his shirt off (it’s only then he remembers that he’s been wearing a Bayer shirt the whole time as well) and chucks it in the general direction of the French windows. Once they’re all eliminated (after Sam gets surrounded by a squad and blows Julian’s eardrums out with his yells), Kai gets up and heads into the bathroom.

Julian’s staring at the floor when Mitch’s voice rings out.

“What are you hiding?”

He knows he owes it to Kai to tell him first, but he doesn’t know how to say it to the man he’s been in love with for over half a year now. Not without Mitch’s help.

“I’m going to Dortmund,” he whispers, barely loud enough for the two of them to hear. He can hear the tap running in the bathroom, knows there isn’t time to explain much further, but he just about gets an explanation that he’s going to the medical in two days when the bathroom door clicks open and Kai re-enters the room.

He wonders if Kai’s heard them when the youngest one goes on another one of his Champions League tirades, but then he throws an arm around Julian’s shoulder and says, “I can’t wait to play there with you again,” and Julian is _fucked._ Especially since Mitch mouths “you need to tell him,” like Julian didn’t already know, and doesn’t know how.

• • • • • • 

He tries to trace the words on Kai’s wrist as they climb the stairs back to the hotel the next night, not knowing if Kai can comprehend them in his sober-drunk state. Mitch and Sam’s voices echo from up ahead and aside from that, they’re completely alone, no one around to see the little touch and the way he has to stop himself from gazing at Kai’s drunk, slurred, beautiful face because he’s not sure he could stop himself if they met eyes.

Julian slides his hand down and curls his fingers around Kai’s. He wonders if Kai can feel the sweat on his palm.

He follows Kai through the hotel, eyes clenching shut against the sudden light of the lobby and widening to stumble their way through the corridors. He wants to wrap his arms around Kai’s waist when his best friend struggles with the key, wants nothing more in the world than to touch him and run his hands over Kai’s skin and try and pretend like everything’s okay.

He bites his apology into the soft skin of Kai’s neck as they fall onto the bed. But that’s different, that’s a deviation from their plotline that he tries to steer away from when he mumbles out the question – begs Kai to tell him what he needs and quashes his annoyance of Kai’s non-specific answer that flares up every time they do this.

The sound of the zip of Kai’s jeans rings in his ears as he runs a fingertip along the inside of Kai’s thighs. The younger one slides a hand inside Julian’s jeans and thumbs along the waistline of his boxers before his hand sneaks lower and _fuck_ , the slightest touch he gives to the base of Julian’s cock is enough to make the oxygen thin. If it wasn’t for the fact Kai’s heard what he sounds like when he comes so many times, he’d be embarrassed at the breathless catch in his voice when he curses his best friend.

Breathing is suddenly the hardest thing in the world when Kai slumps back against the bed, dick visibly hard through his unbuttoned jeans. He can never speak when Julian asks him if he’s okay, Julian knows that, takes the tiny nod Kai gives him for what it’s worth and climbs off the bed.

Kai’s green eyes are fixed on the ceiling when Julian gets back, placing the condom and lube on the corner of the bed. They meet Julian’s when the older one slides Kai’s jeans and boxers off him, stroking the inside of his thigh as he tries to subdue the aftershocks of alcohol that are starting to reverberate through his body.

His stomach jumps in anticipation in time to Kai’s little gasp of shock like it always does when he slides a finger into the younger. He can’t help but wonder who Kai is thinking of when he looks down and suddenly the green has vanished, Kai’s eyes hooded as Julian slides his finger carefully, trying to make sure Kai is safe and cared for.

He wonders if Kai’s ever noticed.

He wonders that if this wasn’t friendly, if he’d be kissing Kai frantically as he rips open the condom packet, leaning their foreheads together and revelling in the faintest of touches of Kai’s nose as it brushes against his while he slides the condom onto his cock. He knows that if Kai knew what he was thinking about, this would end before Julian could even whisper his name.

Kai shudders like he’s been broken from a trance when Julian slides his cock into him. His mind tugs on the want to voice his questions, to ask Kai what he’s thinking about, wants to have his heart broken by the answer because he’s beyond insane when it comes to his best friend, but to speak would change things. It wouldn’t be what this always was.

Something changes when Julian starts to fuck him, he has to train his eyes on the delicious curves of Kai’s stomach because to look at him is too intimate, besides, Kai isn’t looking at him, never has, and he doesn’t want to experience the feeling of not getting what he wants. Not when this could be for the last time.

His hands find their way to the jut of Kai’s hipbones, tracing over the skin there when he hits Kai’s prostate, relishing the way the sensations travel along his dick and settle somewhere in his mind. Kai’s mumbling something Julian knows he isn’t meant to hear, so he doesn’t say anything, quashes the little niggle of intrigue that surfaces when he sees Kai bite his lip in his peripheral vision.

(He definitely doesn’t pay attention to Kai’s lips.)

It gets to the point where they remember how the other works, when Julian thrusts and Kai rolls his hips back to meet him and there should be flames flickering into life from the heat between their bodies and the unabashed panting that Julian can’t stop, but there’s no fuel because Kai is anything but in love with him.

The hand still resting on the younger’s hipbone finds its way up to Kai’s nipples, and Kai lets out a breathy groan of want and he knows Kai well enough by now, knows the minutiae of the little noises Kai does give him to know that his best friend is close, knows exactly how to flick his wrist while he jerks Kai off.

He’s tired, so he doesn’t tease. Kai’s orgasm is almost silent.

(Julian wonders if he’d be louder if he could kiss him.)

He doesn’t get time to ponder it, because it only takes him a couple more thrusts before he slumps down involuntarily, breathing heavily onto the definition of Kai’s muscles as he rides out his orgasm. His teeth bite down on his lips and it’s a miracle he can hold himself back from leaning up to kiss his best friend.

Contemplating the enormity of what’s going to break down once Kai finds out while Kai is lying on the bed five metres away is incredibly risky, he thinks, as he stares at his sex-mussed reflection in the bathroom mirror. Mitch and Sam have been given him increasingly annoyed looks, sharp reminders that he _needs to tell him_ , and he knows he should, but then Kai gives him a soft smile as he comes out of the bathroom that makes Julian unable to tell him, even if he wanted to.

Sleep takes him before the guilt does.

He doesn’t need to confirm his failure to Mitch the next morning, the disappointed look the oldest one gives him the moment he steps out of the elevator is enough. Kai’s with them, looking vaguely dazed and seemingly more hungover than Julian expected, but the thought doesn’t stick in his head when he smiles at the receptionist who checks him out.

Mitch makes a pointed comment about missing him that elicits visible confliction on Kai’s face, and Julian pulls the younger one into a hug that feels scarily like their hug on the last day of the season against Hertha Berlin, when the rumours were flying behind the scenes and Kai being there was grounding, what he needed.

(He doesn’t think he’s dealt with the fact he’s not going to have that again yet.)

Kai’s never had this before, he thinks, when Kai says that he’ll see him in a couple of days. He might be accepting, he might be filled with a rage that makes him try to break Julian’s leg in their first game against each other, or worse, he might cry or do something stupid and Julian will hate himself for fucking ever if that happens.

He feels Sam’s eyes narrow on his back at he climbs into the backseat of the taxi.

By the time he looks back at the hotel lobby, his friends have gone. Kai and he are due to go to Ibiza after the final international break of the season, but that might fall apart depending on Kai’s reaction, so he doesn’t know if he’s kind of just said goodbye.

His mind is weirdly blank the entire flight home. He’s flying into Dortmund and is pretty much being transported directly to Brackel for the medical and contract signing. It’s raining when they land in the city, the Signal-Iduna Park observable from miles into the sky and it feels more real with every metre the plane descends.

It’s a blur. He suffers the fitness tests, and falls asleep during the MRI (he hopes they weren’t scanning his brain when he was sleeping, because he was dreaming of green eyes and a beautiful voice Julian can never quite capture in his head) before the doctor, bedecked in a yellow coat, enters the room where he’s been stationed to wait, with a beaming smile and congratulates him on his medical clearance.

Thoughts and emotions have deserted him when he shoots promotional videos with the Dortmund media team, before he’s driven to a hotel and fears the storm that’s going to break tomorrow morning.

He can’t see Kai’s message when it comes up, so he has a miniature heart attack that Kai’s found out his secret.

 **Kai:** is everything okay?

 **Julian:** everything’s fine

 **Julian:** why are you asking?

 **Kai:** mitch and sam were being really weird

 **Kai:** are you hiding something from me?

He briefly thinks he might be the biggest cunt in the world when he types out a ‘no,’ because he’s really a fucking coward who’s fucking in love and can’t bring himself to tell Kai anything. He types a follow-up message he regrets instantly when Kai’s response comes in. He can almost see the expression on his best friend’s face, frown lines (that he wants nothing more than to smooth out gently) appearing on his forehead as he tuts quietly.

Kai accuses him of keeping Mitch and Sam’s relationship from him, before his tone deflates, and he asks Julian to call him.

For how much he’s thought about him, Julian still isn’t expecting how the sight of Kai, looking slobby and with clearly unbrushed hair, skewers through his heart.

“Hey,” Julian says, “how are you?”

“Alright,” Kai looks absent before his eyes narrow suspiciously at Julian through the FaceTime screen. “Where are you?”

He has to lie, can’t look at Kai as he does so. “My mother’s house. He can’t stop himself from asking him if they’re okay, like he’s worried that Kai knows how he feels. Something crosses Kai’s face that Julian wants to see again, wants to analyse, but it’s gone before Julian can remember it.

“Of course we are,” Kai smiles, but it’s weak. “I just wish you’d talk to me.”

“It’s not always that easy when you’re not with me, and yes, I know I was right next to you twelve hours ago, but I didn’t know it was there to be said for definite then.”

“So, there is something.”

Kai’s voice is edgy, and Julian wants to sprint back to Brackel and rip up the contract, hold the social media team hostage with a knife until they delete every last piece of content and then get his agent to sue all the media outlets speculating about him, but then his murderous thoughts are stopped by Kai’s expectant gaze.

“Yes. I’ll tell you when you get here, okay?”

Like you would ever make it back without knowing. He misses Kai’s response, but he can’t miss the yawn, so he lets Kai hang up and falls back against the hotel pillows, wishing for his bedsheets that have the faintest trace of Kai’s scent on them.

He wakes to the insistent buzz of his phone. There are hundreds of messages of congratulations, but he knows Kai will have seen the news, or if he hasn’t, he will the moment he wakes up.

He scrolls through the notifications until he finds the ones that sent icy fear through him.

 **Sam:** we just heard a bang from kai’s room

 **Sam:** we’re heading over there now

 **Mitch:** I can’t believe you didn’t tell him, Julian.

 **Julian:** I’m sorry.

 **Julian:** I didn’t know how to.

Neither of them replies to his texts, and honestly, he doesn’t deserve them to. He has no idea what Kai’s doing, when he’s papering over his emotions and thinking about his best friend. He doesn’t look at his phone after he posts a goodbye message on Instagram (posting a photo of him alone with Kai and if it’s a self-indulgent moment to pretend like everything’s okay, no one has to know but the world).

The messages of ‘traitor’ flood in almost a second later.

His mind drifts off to a day last summer, when the four of them went to a river on the outskirts of Leverkusen. Mitch and Sam trailed off into the water while Julian sat on the bank with Kai. It was before the love, but Kai was smiling as he stared at the sky. He went to the waterside over winter, sitting and staring at the slow flow of half-frozen water as he thought about Kai.

Once, he went, and he saw Kai there. He wanted to go over, but Kai was dangling his toes in the water and saying something to himself and it felt too personal.

He wished he knew now.

His phone disturbs his thoughts with a loud buzz. He’d muted twitter, so he actually bothers to check it.

 **Mitch:** Kai’s gone missing.

 **Julian:** what? when?

 **Mitch:** I don’t know. We’re out looking for him, but the beach is packed.

 **Julian:** have you called him?

 **Mitch:** His phone’s in his room.

He switches over to his messages from Kai, texts him something desperately that he hopes Kai will read soon. He uses the nickname he barely ever uses after he realised his feelings, the one that Kai would always smile like a dumbass when Julian said.

Not checking his phone becomes impossible after that. One, two, three, four, five hours pass before he gets a text from Mitch saying that Kai’s back safe, only once Julian began seriously considering booking an emergency flight and going back to find him. Except that Kai would probably look at him not like he used to. With something different in his eyes. He doesn’t get a reply, the _seen_ the only confirmation of Kai acknowledging his existence. He attempts to call Kai, how could he not, but he doesn’t even get a ringing tone.

The next day, it’s overcast. He’d gone home first thing, already thinking about how he’s going to go about packing his house up during the journey. It’s still only mid-morning when he gets back, his street still only gently shaking into life when he gets pulled into a painfully tight hug by Jannis.

The sun is setting when Julian heads into his dining room to pick up the glasses, catching sight of a taxi making its way down the street, stopping in front of his house and there’s no one else that it could be.

Kai looks dreadful when he drags his suitcase towards Julian’s front door. The crunch of feet against gravel echoes painfully in Julian’s mind and he can’t stop himself from pacing up and down his entrance hall as he stares at Kai through the tiny window. Right up until his best friend stops, turns around and is now walking away from him.

He’s thrown the door open before he even thinks.

“Kai!” He doesn’t care about the urgency in his voice, the people walking by who can definitely hear them, he needs Kai to know that it wasn’t simple, that it’s hurt him too, that he wanted to stay for him. There’s so much he needs to tell him, but not here, not with Kai frozen on his driveway and he makes his decision in a second, striding over and taking his hand gently.

Kai’s touch already feels different.

“This is yours,” Kai spits out, throwing a shirt of Julian’s at him, and that’s the death of the stupid hope that Kai might not be angry. He looks from the piece of clothing laid across his arms, back to Kai, who looks like he’s been tranquilised because it’s the only way he can deal with the pain Julian’s caused him.

“Kai, I’m sorry. They triggered my release clause.” It’s stupid, awful, idiotic, he does not deserve Kai, never has, deserves the look of hate not hidden on Kai’s face while Julian’s heart just falls deeper in love.

“You didn’t have to go.” Kai’s voice is now void of emotion entirely and that’s _worse_ , like Kai’s accepted Julian is going already and maybe he’s making plans to befriend the new signings. Maybe Julian will see stupid posts of him and Derimbay on his social media next season, heart comments on each other’s posts like Julian was never there. It’s his own damn fault, yet he suddenly hates Derimbay with a burning passion anyway.

“No, I know. I made the choice to go.”

“Why?”

The silence stretches on, up the stairs, down the street, triggers the floodlights of the BayArena to come on and highlight the curve of Kai’s eyebrows and he’s fucking beautiful and Julian wants to tell him everything. His feelings, everything he thinks about when they have sex, it causes him to walk towards Kai and try to grab his hands in his clammy ones, but Kai pulls away and really, Kai’s about this close from killing him. Jannis pretty much saves his life.

When they hug, all Julian can think of is their first meeting when Kai was nine years old. Jannis must say something, because Kai turns back to him with a refreshed anger in his eyes when he bites out, “why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”

Kai’s anger burns brighter on his face with every second Julian remains silent.

(It’s the moment he thinks Kai is done with him forever.)

He stammers out something stupid, and Kai really loses it with him, and he should, he can see the betrayal growing like poison ivy through the cracks in Kai’s voice. If the hurt is showing on his face, he doesn’t care, because Kai needs to see that this isn’t easy for him.

He hates himself for being so selfish. “It was just hard,” he says like it excuses everything, and he isn’t ready for what Kai snaps back.

“What did I do to make talking to me seem hard?”

They must be working in counter-moves, because when Kai’s emotion comes pouring out, Julian feels himself shut down. He’d give anything to get Kai to calm down, begs even though it’s obviously futile judging by the tears staining Kai’s beautiful eyes, and pulling himself out of the magnetic field of Kai’s flaming anger is probably the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He mumbles something about only an hour away, trying to deflect Kai before he starts crying as well, and it only serves to make Kai move to the window and stare out into the street.

“Are we just not good enough? Leverkusen, Mitch, Sam, _me_?” Kai says, and his voice cracks.

 _Fuck._ He moves behind Kai, whispering a promise about how it’s not them, he just wants to explore his career and for a split second, he thinks he’s mollified Kai’s anger. That is, until Kai lets out a noise that sounds scarily like a half-sob and sprints out of the door, suitcase banging noisily against the threshold of Julian’s house.

“KAI!” He screams into the wind. “KAI!”

Kai’s already halfway down the street by the time he’s figured out he should slip shoes on and give chase, running without anything into the darkening Leverkusen night and praying that Kai falls or something and he can catch up.

He goes to Kai’s house on autopilot. Everything’s moving too fast, the emotion, the lack of oxygen, the tears in his eyes making visibility difficult for a moment until he recognises Kai and Sophia on Kai’s apartment doorstep.

Her arms over his shoulder.

Her face against his.

_He’s fucked up, and he doesn’t think he can fix this._

“JANNIS!” He yells the second he steps back into his house. He doesn’t remember the walk back. His brother is in the kitchen, typing something on his laptop when Julian crashes into the room. He probably looks insane, red, blotchy face, heavy breathing and tear stains littered over his cheeks.

“Yes?” Jannis says, looking just like Julian’s worst thoughts.

They all know he’s messed up, he was just too late to make it right.

“I need your help.”

“What with?”

“I’m in love with Kai, and he’s never going to forgive me.”


End file.
